The AddThis Blog

 (Originally posted on the Clearspring blog.) 

Just a week away from Thanksgiving, we are counting our many blessings here at Clearspring. We’ve just been named among the AlwaysOn 2011 Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic Top 100 for being among the most promising private companies “creating new, vital solutions that will lead to industry disruption and huge value creation.” The honor stems from nominations by several top firms including Morgan Stanley, Technology Partners, DFJ, SAP and KPMG.

It’s great to be recognized, especially on the heels of a very busy past couple of months. In late September, we welcomed Ramsey McGrory, formerly of Yahoo! and RMX as our new CEO. In October, we took a look back at five years of sharing and analytics as we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our social sharing platform, AddThis (check us out in Adweek). Last week, AddThis hit another milestone as the largest social sharing platform  – in a 24 hour period, we saw 3,000,000,000 (that’s 3 billion!) views. And, we recently announced our acquisition of data science company, XGraph. Together, we’ve created the largest multi-graph platform on the open web. By  multi-graph, we mean that our understanding of an audience is multi-dimensional where a single-graph would only represent one dimension of how people are connected (like social ties, for instance). Based on 1.2 billion users, the extensive multi-graph capability has incredible implications for all of our partners across the board.

Whew! It’s been busy and we wouldn’t have it any other way. It couldn’t be more appropriate that all of this comes right before we each take a moment to give thanks. We are incredibly grateful to all of our clients, partners, investors and supporters. Thank you AlwaysOn, those that nominated and voted for us for this honor, and all of you for continuing to keep us motivated and inspired. As always, please reach out and let us know how we can better serve you.

We’re excited to announce that Clearspring has acquired XGraph!

XGraph is the leading data science company focused on modeling web-wide connections between people.  Clearspring’s scalable data processing and massive reach via AddThis coupled with XGraph’s technology create the largest multi-graph platform on the open web—mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The social graph, the data structure that maps the connections we have with our friends, has taken the web by storm.  This has proven to be a powerful platform, but this single graph only represents one dimension of how we are connected to one another.   XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as how we are related by brand affiliations, intent and more.  This is the multi-graph.

With our new multi-graph platform, Clearspring has a truly differentiated capability to deliver powerful results to our publishers and advertisers. For publishers, we will use this graph platform to enable deeper audience insight, monetization and actionable data products in the near future.  And, that’s just the beginning.

Thank you, as always, to our customers, partners and investors for making this possible. Welcome XGraph into the Clearspring family!

This month, we celebrate five years of sharing with AddThis.  It began with a simple idea – make bookmarking and sharing easier.  After a few months of coding, AddThis was born.  At first, it was a single button with a few bookmarking services used by a few small publishers.  But it quickly spread across the web and we started to see some interesting trends in how and what people share.  With that information in hand, we introduced sharing analytics to offer this same insight to publishers.

Note: We have replaced the originally posted infographic to reflect the correct number of unqiue users in 2008 to 330M.

(Originally posted on the Clearspring blog)

Today, we’re taking Clearspring to the next level.  I am excited to welcome Ramsey McGrory on as our new CEO. Ramsey joins us from Yahoo! where he led Right Media, the pioneer in the online ad exchange business. From 2004 to 2011 he was with them from start-up what is now a $1 billion annual revenue business. His deep understanding of advertising and data, coupled with a demonstrated ability to deliver value to publishers, advertisers and consumers make him an invaluable addition.  Together with our already impressive team, board and investors, we’re confident that this move will help us continue our fantastic growth by better serving our customers.

We have experienced phenomenal growth since our first investor came on in 2006.. AddThis is the now web’s largest sharing platform used by over 9 million publishers, reaching more than 1 billion people worldwide.  We process as much data in one week as the Library of Congress.  Launched just last year, our Audience Platform leverages data from AddThis to enable hundreds of brands like AT&T and Sony to connect with hundreds of millions of socially-connected users via real-time advertising.  And this growth has been recognized.  Last week we were named to Business Insider’s Digital 100 Most Valuable Start-ups on the heels of making the Inc500 and AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies.

We’re at an inflection point.  If we continue this growth, we will open up opportunities to serve our customers at a scale we never imagined.  To date, we’ve been lucky to bring on amazing people and partners to support our scaling efforts.  Our leadership has helped grown the team over 100% in the first half of this year.  We are proud to have Springers in McLean, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Lancaster, New Jersey, Atlanta and even India.  This spring, IVP joined our already-impressive investor team by leading our $20 million Series D financing.  With Ramsey on board, we believe that we can now not only keep this pace, but have the ability to go even faster.

(Originally posted on the Clearspring blog)

They say things come in three’s! Today, we’re proud to be named to Business Insider’s Digital 100, placing us among the world’s top 100 startups on the web. In great company, we proudly join the ranks of some our sister companies like GroupOn, LivingSocial, MediaBank and BuddyMedia. Having recently been listed in the AlwaysOn Global 250 and Inc500, this rounds out a hat trick we couldn’t be happier to complete. We’re so appreciative of the amazing growth we’ve experienced. It’s icing on the cake to have it acknowledged! A huge thank you to all of our publishers and advertisers for helping us get here. As always, we’re humbled to be at your service. Here’s to you – It’s back to work for us!

We are excited to announce that we have just gone live with a major upgrade of our analytics software and deployed that software in our brand-spanking-new data centers! These new data centers represent a massive increase in the computational power. Our new servers boast over 2000 CPU Cores, 1.8 Petabytes of capacity, and around 6000G of RAM. With this new data center roll-out you will notice a major improvement in page-load times when browsing your analytics. In some cases page-load times have improved by over 1000%.

Since we also run a website, we understand how important analytics are to a publisher or site owner. We consider it essential to us to make our tools as accessible and easy-to-use as possible.

Performance is and always will be an ongoing effort so if you ever notice any lags or are having trouble retrieving a report, please report to us so we can take a look.

Inc. 500 named Clearspring – the company behind AddThis –  among its fastest growing private companies in the US for 2011! At #287 of the 2011 Inc 500 and #38 in the advertising and marketing industry, we join an impressive list of companies ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2007 – 2010.

Top corporations like Microsoft, Zappos, Intuit, Jamba Juice, American Apparel and other major powerhouses gained early exposure as members of the Inc. 500. On the heels of our recent AlwaysOn award, we are humbled to be included.

We send our sincerest thanks to our publisher and advertiser partners. Nothing but great things to look forward to together!

We’re very happy to announce that this Sunday we’ll be making a very big update to our network. We will be increasing our bandwidth into our data center by 10x.

This is just one of the steps we are taking to continue improving our existing and new products’ performance. There will be more updates to come.

It’s important to note that this should not affect any of the AddThis services and everything should remain up and running as usual!

Please feel free to email us if you have any questions.

(Also posted on the Clearspring blog.)

Today, I’m honored to announce that Clearspring has been named as a 2011 AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Company.

The winning companies represent leaders in on-demand computing, digital media and entertainment, and greentech, and were selected because of their innovation and leadership.   We’re flattered to be included with so many great companies.

Thanks to AlwaysOn for this award and for recognizing us throughout the years.  Here are some of the other AlwaysOn awards that we’ve won leading up to this one:

• OnMedia 100 Top Private Companies in 2011
• OnHollywood 100 Top Private Companies in 2010
• Mid-Atlantic 100 Top Private Companies in 2010
• East 100 Top Private Companies in 2010
• OnHollywood 100 Top Private Companies in 2009
• East 100 Top Private Companies in 2009

It’s been a busy first half of the year. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements & innovations. We’re working on some really cool stuff.