Clearspring Technologies, the developer of social sharing platform AddThis, is launching its mobile strategy today, unveiling optimized technologies for the iPhone, Android and mobile web.
For background, the AddThis button sharing tool is currently deployed on 9 million websites worldwide and allows users to easily and quickly share content with others through more than 300 social networking services in 70 languages. → Read More
The name Clearspring Technologies may not be terribly familiar to you, but chances are you’ve often clicked on or at least come across its AddThis buttons, which are plastered on publisher sites Web-wide.
The U.S.-based social sharing platform company this morning announced that it has raised a whopping $20 million in a Series D round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners, with existing backers such as NEA and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. → Read More
Like Twitter, AddToAny turns five years old this week. It doesn’t garner even a fraction of the attention that venture-backed competitors like Clearspring (AddThis), Gigya and ShareThis do, but it has definitely put its stake in the social sharing widget ground.
Note: the above-cited rivals have raised roughly $90 million combined, while AddToAny has never taken outside financing since it was founded back in 2006. → Read More
ShareThis, which you may be familiar with thanks to all the buttons online publishers worldwide have been plastering on their sites to lure you into spreading their content, is now live at roughly 1 million websites, aggregately reaching more than 400 million users.
The company has now tapped Kristen Fergason, formerly a marketer at Yahoo, as its new CMO to grow even more. In addition to her hiring, ShareThis has named Julie Greenhouse SVP Ad Sales & Business Development and Ben Slutter VP of Revenue and Ad Operations. Both were with the company previously. → Read More
Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.
Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost. → Read More
The first TechStars company to launch, MadKast has raised a $300,000 series A round of financing from EONBusiness Venture Capital and several Angel investors in California and Colorado. Another TechStars company, EventVue, closed their own round of funding last week. MadKast is an embeddable widget that lets you easily share links with your friends on any of 15 link sharing sites (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, …). But unlike other link-sharing widgets such as AddThis, MadKast also lets you send links via email, SMS, or IM. It’s a rather simple, yet useful, tool for letting your readers spread your posts. → Read More
You may have seen the AddThis buttons on blogs at some point while surfing the web. It’s a simple, free widget blog owners can add to their site that shows a number of bookmarking options at the end of a blog post (there’s also a feed reader widget for easy RSS subscriptions). Readers can bookmark the post on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Bluedot and other services with a single click. As an example, we’ve added an AddThis button to the end of this post. The service launched in October 2006 and announced that the widget was being served over 1 million times per day last month. Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’ve reached the 2 million milestone. If you’re interested in adding the AddThis widget to your site, the customization tool is here. AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data tomorrow – showing the top bookmarking services and feed readers where their users store data (see the graphs below). Given that AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine other things they could do with all of this data. The top bookmarking services, after the browser feature itself (“favorites”) are del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks, followed by Digg and Yahoo My Web. No surprises there. The top feed reader by a large margin is the much improved Google Reader, which is more popular than Yahoo and Bloglines combined. I am surprised at that – Recent Feedburner data suggested Google Reader was doing very well, but not as well as the AddThis data suggests. → Read More
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