Dive Brief:
- Share counts have been removed from tweet buttons across the Internet.
- Twitter announced the move in October, but some publishers were still caught unaware when the share counts were finally scratched.
- Twitter’s reasoning for the move was simplifying its platform and acknowledging the counts were inaccurate due to the API endpoint used to serve the metric.
Dive Insight:
Those Twitter share figures found on "Tweet" buttons across the Internet are no more, and some publishers aren’t pleased with the move. Twitter announced back in February it was dropping the share metric from its buttons in an effort to simplify the platform as well as address the fact the share counts were inherently inaccurate. Despite the notice, some publishers were caught off guard when the social proof of sharing content was no longer visible on that content’s webpage.
Slate Vice Chairman Dan Check told Digiday, “We want that count back. It’s meaningful to us. Having share counts along with comment counts is a strong way to underline that there’s a conversation around what we’ve written. We want to signal to readers that that conversation is happening.”
Publishers argue the data is serves as a guidepost for what is performing well and also a way to promote popular content to readers – and a way to showcase that content to advertisers as well.
The move was done at the API level, so even third-party tweet buttons don’t have access to share data unless the provider pays Twitter’s Gnip subsidiary for search archive access at a monthly fee based on data usage.
