Companies Using Hatena Bookmark Button

The Hatena Bookmark button is a Japanese product with a Japanese audience, and our October 2026 crawl shows how it spreads: through a WordPress theme and through Hatena's own blog platform, more than through anyone pasting a button by hand. A domain counts when a page loads a script from st-hatena.com, in practice Hatena's bookmark_button.js. The test is clean. A plain fetch of every live domain found the button script on 92.8% of the 8,170 homepages that answered, and in a browser 51 of 58 sampled domains loaded it, with 2 more calling only Hatena's bookmark-count API. That gives 8,322 live domains, 12th of 69 in the category.

A theme decides the footprint

AFFINGER runs on 41.6% of the homepages we fetched (3,402 of 8,170). Its sales page calls it a WordPress theme built for earning, and STINGER, its former name, adds another 7.3%. Together that's 49.0% of the fetched homepages from one theme family. Hatena Blog pages make up 16.1% of the fetched homepages, and 98.3% of AFFINGER homepages carry the button, which tells you it ships in the theme's share bar rather than being added site by site.

Sales signal: a Hatena button on a Japanese WordPress site mostly identifies an AFFINGER blog. If you sell to Japanese affiliate and AdSense publishers, this list is a fast way to find them.

Short chart, steady count

We began tracking the button in August 2026, so the chart has three points: 6,367 domains in August, 8,050 in September and 8,322 in October. The first step is mostly ours. The domain set we crawl turns over each month as dead sites drop out and new ones come in, and our detection signals have widened since August. September to October added 272. Churn is low: 283 domains dropped the button since 4 August, 30 of which still run it on another hostname. One quirk sits inside the count. 2.8% of the homepages we fetched (232 pages) are dead Hatena Blog addresses, custom domains still pointed at Hatena after the blog was deleted. Hatena's 'page not found' screen loads the button, so they stay in.

"Most of these buttons weren't installed one by one. A blogger picked AFFINGER or Hatena Blog, and the button came with it." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: treat the count as a stable map of Japan's monetised blogs, not a growth story. Dead Hatena Blog domains are worth filtering out before any outreach.

Who we can name

Only 391 of the 8,322 domains match a company, about 4.7%, because personal blogs don't have company records. The ones that do lean towards Japanese tech firms with engineering blogs on Hatena Blog. IT Services and IT Consulting (15.21%), Software Development (9.51%) and Technology, Information and Internet (7.98%) lead, and tech labels add up to 34.98%. Size follows from that. 41.56% have 1 to 10 staff and 29.38% have 11 to 50, but 17.19% have 51 to 200, against 10.5% on EmbedSocial's page. Founding years cluster in the 2000s (32.63%) and 2010s (31.05%): RAKUS (2000), Adways (2001), BrainPad (2004), MedPeer (2004).

Sales signal: for developer tools and recruiting products, the named list is a ready-made set of Japanese companies that blog about their engineering. RAKUS, MedPeer, Akatsuki and GO all run one.

Japan, almost entirely

308 of the 391 matched companies are in Japan, then the United States with 25. In the full count, 88.6% of the homepages we fetched have a Japanese title. The hosting points the same way: Xserver, a Japanese host, is on 37.65% of the 8,439 clean live domains we profile. Outside tech blogs, the named sites are Japanese media: Kakaku.com's product news, the Asahi Shimbun's AERA STYLE MAGAZINE, Bandai Namco Entertainment's FUNFARE.

Sales signal: this is a Japan-only list. Any campaign built on it needs Japanese copy and a Japanese offer.

Beside X, not instead of it

Japanese bloggers put Hatena's button next to X's. 3,969 domains run both today out of 4,066 ever seen with both, so our switching tests found nothing to report. Global share tools barely touch this audience: 53 domains run the button with AddToAny today, out of 59 ever seen together, and AddToAny's own count is 134,763.

"Hatena and X sit side by side on almost four thousand Japanese sites. Site owners add both rather than choosing one." - Sophie Clarke, Product Marketing Manager at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a share-tool vendor won't win these sites by replacing Hatena. The opening is the theme authors, since one theme decision changes thousands of share bars.

The stack: a blogger's toolkit

Across the 8,439 clean live domains, WordPress runs on 71.6% and Hatena Blog on 16.12%. Google Analytics is on 80.03% and Google AdSense on 37.63%, which fits a theme sold on earning. X's widgets appear on 46.83%. Intimate Merger, a Japanese data platform, is on 2.73% and Amazon Advertising on 1.92%. Site Kit (11.14%) and WordPress.com Stats (10.06%) point to self-managed WordPress installs.

Sales signal: ad networks, affiliate programmes and WordPress hosting in Japan have the clearest fit here. A site with AFFINGER, AdSense and Xserver is a full-time blogger's stack.

What it costs

Hatena's button guide lists no price. You choose a design, whether to show the label and the bookmark count, the size and the language (Japanese or English), then paste the code; one script tag covers several buttons on a page. Using it requires agreeing to Hatena's terms and privacy policy. Hatena Bookmark itself launched on 19 August 2005, per Hatena's 20th-anniversary post, and Hatena Co., Ltd. was founded in Kyoto in July 2001.

Sales signal: the button has no listed price, so there's no contract to displace. What you're really targeting is the blog behind it.

Key takeaways

1. 8,322 live domains, 12th of 69, mostly Japanese.

2. One theme family, AFFINGER and STINGER, accounts for 49.0% of the homepages we fetched.

3. Only 391 domains match a company, and tech labels cover 34.98% of them, many through engineering blogs on Hatena Blog.

4. Hatena and X run side by side on 3,969 domains; there's no switching to report.

5. AdSense on 37.63% and Xserver on 37.65%: a monetised-blog stack.

How to use this list

Filter out dead Hatena Blog pages, then split by theme and by company match. For the full list of 8,322 Hatena Bookmark domains with company and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io. For the global share tools in the same category, see ShareThis.