AddThis is a web technology company based in Vienna, Virginia, United States. The company operates AddThis.com, a widely used social bookmarking service that can be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget. Once the widget is added, visitors to the website can bookmark an item using a variety of services, such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Bookmarks, Pinterest, andTwitter. The site reaches 1.3 billion unique visitors monthly and is used by more than 14 million web publishers , and currently holds second position for providing services in audience providing management and visit measurement worldwide. The company changed its name from Clearspring in May 2012.

 

AddThis's audience platform enables brand marketers to deliver interest-based advertising to social influencers. The company has raised over US$58 million in venture capital. Funding is fromInstitutional Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, Rho Ventures, as well as from angel investors Steve Case, Ron Conway, and Ted Leonsis.

 

History

Clearspring Technologies was founded in 2004 by Carnegie Mellon University graduate students Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

2004: The company began as a R&D and consulting concern focused on commercializing research concepts around the semantic web and social networks. Funding for the work came primarily from grants and consulting projects.

 

2005: With funding from friends and family, alongside a US$100,000 investment from Idea Foundry, the team created the first Semantic Start Page. This service provided users customizable, browser-based dashboard to consume information and news. Users could add widgets from publishers across the web and share content across their social graph.

 

2006: The company raised a Series A investment led by Novak Biddle and ZG Ventures to fund the development of the technology developed the previous year. The team relocated the headquarters of the company to Virginia and focused on launching the first part of this platform—a widget sharing and tracking platform for publishers called LaunchPad.

 

Dominique Vonarburg launched AddThis.com at the DEMO Conference in September 2006. 

 

2007-2008: Clearspring grew LaunchPad into the #1 ComScore-ranked platform. The company launched its first experimental advertising programs. NEA led an US$18 million Series C investment in the company to finance its continued rapid growth. In March, AddThis had served more than 100 million widgets to websites. Website growth was 100 percent per month, with some two million views a day. In 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis LLC, the largest link sharing and tracking platform, with the intent of creating a single content sharing platform for publishers under one brand: AddThis. The total reach of the combined platform per Comscore was 254 million unique users.

On September 30, 2008, AddThis.com was purchased by the Web 2.0 company Clearspring for an undisclosed sum. Together, the companies reached an audience of more than 200 million monthly viewers. Clearspring CEO and founder Hooman Radfar believed that the acquisition would "create a large platform of targeted content and capitalize on the next evolution in online advertising—widgets". He also said, "Today both of our products are services to publishers and advertisers. Ultimately we want to build an ecosystem with developers of new services, applications, and advertisers, that delivers a simple experience to consumers." 

 

2008-2009: Clearspring upgraded AddThis with widget-sharing capabilities from LaunchPad. The company then discontinued the LaunchPad offering. During this transition period, AddThis continued to grow and by the end of 2009, reached 600 million unique users worldwide. 

 

2010: The company launched the Clearspring Audience Platform, enabling brand marketers to deliver interest-based display advertising to users across the web. At the end of 2010, AddThis topped over 1 billion unique users reached monthly and was used by over 8 million unique domains. This same year, Clearspring led the creation of OExchange - the first open standard for online content sharing - alongside Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and others. 

 

2011: In May, Clearspring raised a US$20 million D round of venture funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. In September, the company hired a new CEO, Ramsey McGrory, formerly of RightMedia and Yahoo!. Co-founder Hooman Radfar became Executive Chairman. In October 2011, the company's AddThis platform turned 5 years old. In November 2011, Clearspring acquired data science company XGraph. 

 

2012: On May 10, 2012, Clearspring became the company AddThis, adopting the name of its largest product. AddThis launched three new sharing and analytics tools, a Trending Content Box, Follow Tools, and Welcome Bar. AddThis began supporting content sharing for Pinterest, a service with a 50 percent monthly growth rate from January 2012 to February 2012. In May, AddThis announced support for Web Intents. In August, the company began offeringsocial login. 

 

Like Button Lawsuit

The company a is subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media which is also suing Facebook for the use of patents belonging to deceased Dutch Programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer which involve the "Like" button.