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 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 t ...

. 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

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 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 Comscore, Inc. is an American-based global media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, advertising agencies, brand marketers, and publishers. History Comscore was founded in July 1999 in Resto ...

. On January 5, 2016, AddThis was purchased by

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

, 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 and ...

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 Canvas fingerprinting is one of a number of Device fingerprint, browser fingerprinting techniques for Web tracking, tracking online users that allow websites to identify and track visitors using the HTML5 canvas element instead of browser cookies o ...

. 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 whitehouse.gov or wh.gov is the official website of the White House and is managed by the Office of Digital Strategy of the White House Office under the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It was launched in 1994 by 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.

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

History

Like button lawsuit

Canvas fingerprint tracking

See also

References

External links