AddThis is a widely used social bookmarking

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....

 service founded by Dom Vonarburg and owned by Clearspring

Clearspring

Clearspring Technologies is a web technology company based in McLean, Virginia, USA. Clearspring's AddThis sharing platform reaches 1.2B unique visitors monthly and is used by over 10MM web publishers to virally distribute and track content across blogs, social networks and other web sites...

 that can be integrated into a website with the use of a web widget

Web widget

In computing a web widget is a software widget for the web. It's a small application that can be installed and executed within a web page by an end user. They are derived from the idea of code reuse. Other terms used to describe web widgets include: portlet, gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule,...

. Once added, visitors to the website can bookmark an item using a variety of services, such as Facebook

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

, MySpace

MySpace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

, Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmarks

Google Bookmarks is a free online bookmark storage service, available to Google Account holders. It was launched on October 10, 2005. Google Bookmarks allows users to bookmark favorite websites and add labels or tags, and also notes....

, and Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

.

History

Work began on AddThis in March 2006. The domain name was purchased from its previous owner in the same month. The website was launched at the DEMO Conference

DEMO conference

The DEMO conference is a technology conference that focuses on showcasing new products from both entrepreneurs and established companies. It is held by IDG....

 in September 2006.

The website was purchased by Web 2.0

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

company Clearspring on September 30, 2008, for an undisclosed sum. Together, the companies reach an audience of more than 200 million monthly viewers. Commenting on the acquisition, Clearspring's CEO and founder Hooman Radfar believed that it would "create a large platform of targeted content and capitalize on the next evolution in online advertising—widgets". He also said, "Today both of our products are services to publishers and advertisers. Ultimately we want to build an ecosystem with developers of new services, applications, and advertisers, that delivers a simple experience to consumers."

On March 5, 2007, AddThis announced that they had served over 100 million widgets to websites that use its service. The website was growing at a rate of 100% per month, and the service was registering about two million views a day.