The story
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 company XGraph in 2011. In September, the company hired a new CEO, Ramsey McGrory, formerly of RightMedia and Yahoo!, 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 Pinterest and Web Intents. In August, the company began offering social login. 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.
On January 5, 2016, AddThis was purchased by Oracle Corporation 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 31 of that year.
From Wikipedia’s article on AddThis, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4