AddThis is a free
social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...
service that can be integrated into a website with the use of a
web widget
A web widget is a web page or web application that is embedded as an element of a host web page but which is substantially independent of the host page, having limited or no interaction with the host. A web widget commonly provides users of the ...
. Once the widget is added, visitors to the website can bookmark or share an item using a variety of services, such as
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
,
MySpace,
Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...
, and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
.
AddThis collects users' behavioural data, even if they do not share anything. The site reaches 1.9 billion unique visitors monthly and is used by more than 15 million web publishers.
The service operated under companies including AddThis, Inc., AddThis, LLC, and Clearspring Technologies, Inc. until the company's acquisition by
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
on January 5, 2016.
Most anti-malware software blocks the website as a malicious adware webpage.
History
AddThis, LLC was founded in 2004 by Hooman Radfar, Austin Fath, and Dom Vonarburg. By 2007, AddThis had served more than 100 million widgets to websites, with website growth at 100 percent per month and some two million views a day.
In 2008, Clearspring Technologies, Inc. acquired AddThis, LLC, with the intent of creating a single content sharing platform for publishers under one brand: AddThis. The combined platform per Comscore was 254 million unique users.
Clearspring upgraded AddThis with widget-sharing capabilities from LaunchPad, then discontinued the LaunchPad offering, reaching 600 million unique users by the end of 2009.
In 2010, the company launched the Clearspring Audience Platform, a service for brand marketers to deliver interest-based display advertising across the web, which topped 1 billion unique users and was used by over 8 million unique domains. Clearspring acquired
data science
Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a br ...
company XGraph in 2011. In September, the company hired a new CEO, Ramsey McGrory, formerly of RightMedia and
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
, with co-founder Radfar becoming executive chairman.
On May 10, 2012, Clearspring changed its name to AddThis, its most widely used product. The company launched three sharing and analytics tools: Trending Content Box, Follow Tools, and Welcome Bar, as well as supporting content sharing for
Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...
and
Web Intents Web Intents was an experimental framework for web-based inter-application communication and service discovery.
Web Intents consists of a discovery mechanism and a very light-weight RPC system between web applications, modelled after the Intents sy ...
.
In August, the company began offering
social login
Social login is a form of single sign-on using existing information from a social networking service such as Facebook, Twitter or Google, to sign into a third party website instead of creating a new login account specifically for that website. It i ...
. In September,
CFO
The chief financial officer (CFO) is an officer of a company or organization that is assigned the primary responsibility for managing the company's finances, including financial planning, management of financial risks, record-keeping, and financ ...
Richard Harris took over as CEO.
In March 2014, the company was named number one on the Top 30 Syndicated Ad Focus Entities by
comScore.
On January 5, 2016, AddThis was purchased by
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
for almost $200 million. Before being acquired, AddThis had raised roughly $73 million to date.
Like button lawsuit
The company was the subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media, which also sued
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, for the use of patents that were first implemented in
Surfbook
Surfbook was an early social networking service created by Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van der Meer in the years prior to his death in June 2004. Surfbook was based on technologies whose patents were filed by Van der Meer in 1998 an ...
and belonging to deceased Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer that involve the
"Like" button.
Canvas fingerprint tracking
In July 2014,
ProPublica
ProPublica (), legally Pro Publica, Inc., is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. In 2010, it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, for a piece written by one of its journalists''The Guardian'', April 13, 2010P ...
exposed AddThis for uniquely identifying and tracking users using a controversial technique called
canvas fingerprinting
Canvas fingerprinting is one of a number of browser fingerprinting techniques for tracking online users that allow websites to identify and track visitors using the HTML5 canvas element instead of browser cookies or other similar means. The techni ...
.
With a storage and user identification method that is harder to block than
cookie
A cookie is a baked or cooked snack or dessert that is typically small, flat and sweet. It usually contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of oil, fat, or butter. It may include other ingredients such as raisins, oats, chocolate chips, n ...
-based tracking, AddThis was able to more pervasively identify and track users' online browsing history on websites such as
WhiteHouse.gov
whitehouse.gov (also simply known as wh.gov) is the official website of the White House and is managed by the Office of Digital Strategy. It was launched on July 29, 1994 by the Clinton administration.
The content of the website is in the ...
and
YouPorn.com. YouPorn removed AddThis after the ProPublica article was published, citing that they were "completely unaware that AddThis contained a tracking software that had the potential to jeopardize the privacy of our users."
AddThis allows users to opt-out of their tracking tools via their corporate website; the opt-out process requires the user to provide name, country of residence and physical address.
See also
*
AddToAny
AddToAny is a universal sharing platform that can be integrated into a website by use of a web widget or plugin. Once installed, visitors to the website can share or save an item using a variety of services. AddToAny makes money by selling ano ...
*
List of social bookmarking websites
A social bookmarking website is a centralized online service that allows users to store and share Internet bookmarks. Such a website typically offers a blend of social and organizational tools, such as annotation, categorization, folksonomy-based ...
*
ShareThis
ShareThis is a technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It offers free website tools and plugins for online content creators. ShareThis collects data on user behavior, and provides thi ...
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Addthis
Social bookmarking websites
American companies established in 2004
Internet properties established in 2004
Companies based in Vienna, Virginia
2016 mergers and acquisitions
Oracle acquisitions