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AddThis was a free
social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share Internet bookmark, bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious (website), Delicious, founded i ...
service that could be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget. Once the widget was added, visitors of a website using the service could bookmark or share an item using a variety of services, such as
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...
,
Pinterest Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital Bulletin board, pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pint ...
, and
Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
. AddThis collected users' behavioural data, even if they do not share anything. The site reached 1.9 billion unique visitors monthly and was 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 corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...
on January 5, 2016. AddThis would continue to run until all services were terminated on May 31, 2023.


History

AddThis, LLC was founded in 2004 by Hooman Radfar, Austin Fath, and Dominique 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 academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...
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 portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
, 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 social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital Bulletin board, pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pint ...
and Web Intents. 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 Account, Google, to login to a third party website instead of creating a new login account specifically for tha ...
. In September, CFO 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 corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...
for almost $200 million. Before being acquired, AddThis had raised roughly $73 million to date. On April 1, 2023, Oracle announced that it would terminate AddThis services as of May 31st of that year.


Like button lawsuit

The company was the subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media, which also sued
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
, for the use of patents that were first implemented in Surfbook 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 investigative journalism organization based in New York City. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time reporters, and the resulting stories are distributed to ne ...
exposed AddThis for uniquely identifying and tracking users using a controversial technique called canvas fingerprinting. With a storage and user identification method that is harder to block than
cookie A cookie is a sweet biscuit with high sugar and fat content. Cookie dough is softer than that used for other types of biscuit, and they are cooked longer at lower temperatures. The dough typically contains flour, sugar, egg, and some type of ...
-based tracking, AddThis was able to more pervasively identify and track users' online browsing history on websites such as WhiteHouse.gov 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 * List of social bookmarking websites * ShareThis


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Addthis Social bookmarking websites American companies established in 2004 American companies disestablished in 2023 Internet properties established in 2004 Internet properties disestablished in 2023 Companies based in Vienna, Virginia Defunct websites Oracle acquisitions 2016 mergers and acquisitions