The AddThis Blog

Friends, Happy Friday!

As you probably have seen from our announcements in early August here at Clearspring (parent of AddThis), we recently launched some really cool technology: the Audience Platform. This new platform enables web publishers (you guys) and advertisers to more effectively reach and identify audiences online.

With your support, AddThis now reaches over 1B unique users per month and is growing fast. In order to deliver analytics on how your content has been shared, we’ve created a highly scalable real-time data processing engine. This engine processes terabytes of data daily and can discover a broad range of insights about how people engage with and share content online.

At Clearspring, we have always been focused on creating technologies to connect publishers and advertisers to audiences on the social web. AddThis increases traffic to your site via sharing and enables you to learn more about what content drives that traffic. Now, with Audience Platform, you can learn more about users based on data aggregated from all activity from across the AddThis Platform. Specifically:

• We can group people into buckets like movie-goers, social influencers, and others.
• You’ll be able to know what bucket a given user falls into when they come to your site
• These buckets could be applied to do creating a better user experience
• Examples include delivering more relevant ads, or personalizing their content experience.

Though we are in the early stages, the team is pumped about the potential of this new technology. It will enable a whole new set of possibilities for you. In addition to helping you guys work better with your audiences, it enables advertisers to deliver consumers more relevant ads. Don’t worry, no ads are being shown on AddThis publisher tools, or on publisher inventory without permission. We are working with Advertisers to power interest-based ads only on sites that have given us permission. This approach enables us to create advertising opportunities, while maintaining the performance and integrity of the AddThis experience for your users.

We’re starting to roll out the publisher side of the platform with a number of partners. For those of you that are interested in learning more, or in helping us shape this offering, please sign-up. We will continue to roll out the Audience Platform for Publishers more broadly in the coming months.

We hope you’re as excited to keep working with us as we are excited to keep building cool stuff. If you’re not ready to be included in the Audience Platform, no worries – we have a way to opt-out today. Cookie setting can be turned off. Drop us a note (support@addthis.com) and we’ll send you the documentation. As a heads up, opting out means you will turn off menu personalization (needs cookies, sorry), limit your future analytics (cookies, again), and prevent access to the Audience Platform (fill in the blank).

Although making sure consumers get more relevant and less disruptive advertising is a good thing, this aim needs to be balanced with user privacy. Clearspring is committed to protecting user privacy. Here are some the things we are doing on that end:

• AddThis uses standard HTML cookies only
• We do not collect, store, or sell any personally identifiable information (PII)*
• We enable users to opt-out of interest-based ads on Clearspring and AddThis sites
• We plan to support IAB interest-based ad standards
• We applied for NAI membership early this year and await approval
• We continuously work with you to keep improving our approach

For more info about how we use data, check out our shiny new privacy policy. Special thanks to those of you in the community that helped us with this policy. We’d love your feedback about how we can give you the best way to pick and choose how to engage with our different products. We want to hear your thoughts, so we know we’re serving you the best we can. Please drop us an e-mail at – support@addthis.com.
This is an evolving space and things are moving fast. Thanks for continuing to work with us to create the best, easy-to-use, tools to connect you with your audience. As always, hit us up if you have ideas on how we can do better!

Thanks, Hooman

*Email addresses are transmitted, but not collected, only when required to share content to some destinations. Email addresses and their content are not collected, stored, or sold.