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.
In 2008, AddThis became part of Clearspring. Our vision was simple – create the web’s sharing platform. It took a lot of work, but together with you guys, we really made a dent in this goal. AddThis is now the largest content sharing platform on the web. Used by 10 million websites reaching over 1.2 billion people each month, the platform enables users to easily share to over 300 sharing destinations in over 70 languages. We are truly a global platform. Our in-house data processing capabilities, coupled with this huge reach, has put us in a great position to serve publishers in new and unique ways. This year, we introduced real-time analytics and the ability to track sharing that occurs via copy/paste actions on the address bar. The new suite of analytics helps publishers understand how people interact with their content right now, what their interests and influences are, and how they can increase engagement and social reach. With this same technology, we can derive insight into consumer interests and deliver more relevant advertising to users across the web. And that’s just the beginning.
Thank you so much for your loyalty and support over these last five years. It’s been an amazing ride and we are excited to work with you to have an even better next five years. In honor of our birthday, please enjoy this tasty infographic that captures some of what we’ve learned about sharing over the last half decade. Enjoy!
Note: We have replaced the originally posted infographic to reflect the correct number of unqiue users in 2008 to 330M.
As you know, we recently joined 
It’s already been 18 months since we launched, an eternity in Internet time, and AddThis is continuing to grow very fast. Here is a graph we wanted to share with you. It gives a good idea of how fast our button is spreading. The graph shows how many times the button has been served each month since we started in October 2006 – over 20 Billion times in April alone (that’s 7,500 per second).