Alongside the boom in social media consumption, the world of social sharing, delivering content from a siloed source to a social destination has exploded in the last few years, as casual and professional media alike are scrapping for ways to bring their content to the fast-flowing streams of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. A chief benefactor of this trend has been Clearspring, the company behind the practically ubiquitous AddThis buttons, which you see adorning Web sites of all types. The company, recognizing more than a billion unique users across the nine million sites where its buttons are installed, announced this morning the raise of $20 million to help harness the data being gathered and providing the next generation of analytics.

A few months ago, during the company's semi-regular swings to Silicon Valley, I met with Hooman Radfar, co-founder and CEO of Clearspring for dinner here in Sunnyvale, and was struck by the reach of Clearspring's properties, which has to be one of the few Internet names to touch ten digits worth of people. With Facebook counting user numbers well into the 600 million and beyond, for Clearspring to talk up a _billion_ users is quite an accomplishment. Of course, a widget on a Web site is not the same as a fully immersive experience, but in a world focused on data, and the extraction of meaning from that data, he with the biggest numbers wins.

Unsurprisingly, this morning's announcement focuses on how the gathered data will "accelerate Clearspring’s next-generation publisher products and continued growth of its advertising offerings, as well as to help fuel strategic acquisitions." There's no telling if $20 million will be enough to drive a big acquisition of any kind, but in a phone conversation yesterday, Radfar told me the company already had a good amount of money in the bank prior to the raise, while the new round brought "additional powder" for engaging in M&A, giving the company more flexibility for future expansion.

The AddThis platform, thanks to its universal visibility, has already become an interesting stopping point for statistics on which of the many social networks out there are gaining traction month by month, as I had highlighted back in late 2009 with the launch of their service directory. Interestingly, as captured in that post from 18 months or so ago, Facebook at the time accounted for 28 percent of all social sharing. Today, that number has increased 50 percent to 43 percent of all sharing throughout the AddThis network. In the same period, Twitter expanded from 8 percent to nearly 10 percent, and Myspace fell from having just over 8 percent to just over 2 percent, a 75 percent decrease.

AddThis' big numbers make it one of the top ten largest audiences online today, according to their press release, claiming also that revenue is on pace to triple from the previous year, and staffing is expanding at the rate of one new hire per week, on pace to double staff. Math suggests the doubling brings the team from just over 50 to more than 100 to exit 2011, and for AddThis, the future looks to be all about numbers.

“We’ve always held the view that big data would be one of the most valuable assets to come out of the social web,” said Ted Leonsis, Clearspring’s Chairman in today's release. “It is no surprise to anyone close to the company that we have parlayed our expertise in social sharing to achieve a reach surpassing Yahoo!."

AddThis supports more than 300 disparate social networks, so if you're like me and want to bring attention to the edge cases, you can find their orange squared buttons with the white plus symbol and share anywhere you like. Having $20 million more available makes it more likely you'll find these buttons in more places.

The age-old guidance of buying low and selling high has appeared to escape the halls of Yahoo!. If we ignore the Microsoft and Yahoo! acquisition dance of 2008, which ended up in Yahoo!'s staying independent, but losing dramatic market capitalization, search market share, and accelerating an employee exodus, both voluntary and involuntary, it's still clear the company intends to wring all the remaining value out of its vestigial pieces before selling - effectively promising low to no returns on every deal.

Yesterday's news leaked that Yahoo! had plans to kill or spin off a number of Web services, including Delicious, Alta Vista, MyBlogLog and others. Given the abandonment and mismanagement of these properties, this is not too surprising.


Alta Vista's mismanagement goes back more than a decade. In 1999, I wrote a story (this is pre-blog, so I'd love to say "post") on Internet Valley's Web site about how Compaq was not leveraging Alta Vista after they acquired Digital Equipment Corp. (See: Warning: Compaq is On the WWWarpath) The site is a shell of its former self, once being my go-to search site.

But Delicious is what has everyone up in arms, as the company was among the first Web 2.0 darlings, and is still widely used, as the Web's definitive bookmarking site. I've personally tagged more than 3,000 items in the last few years, most of them capturing external links to the blog. Yahoo! has managed to take a site with a deep bench of fans, considerable use, and make it obvious they would love to give it away. It's not even clear if anybody really works on it any more, or if it's just being maintained by the company's techies.


On this background, both Web traffic stats and sharing statistics from third party sites show the party long since ended at Delicious. Compete, whose traffic graphs are anything if not suspect, still manages to display some trendlines right, showing a decrease in traffic of nearly one half in the last year. In parallel, AddThis, the social sharing site, shows decreased Delicious bookmarking, down by 14% in the last three months, the fastest declining site of its kind on the service.


The moves Delicious has made have been odd or delayed. The long-awaited "New Delicious" was way behind schedule, and recent bumps made sharing to external services even more difficult. It's as if the company wanted to punish the users it had left.

If you want to get a fantastic return on a sale, the best time to sell is when you don't have to, when things are going fantastic and you have real momentum. Yahoo! has essentially telegraphed to the world that it wants to ditch Delicious to someone, anyone. But the catch is, its users already started ditching it themselves. Buy high, kill.... sell. That's the wrong order of things, Yahoo!.

Over the last 90 days of available statistics, popular multi-network sharing service AddThis shows few surprises in its top services selected by customers. Facebook dominates all options with nearly 40 percent of all shares, with Twitter and e-mail having just under ten percent apiece. But further down the chart, while most services saw single digit moves, up or down, two Google services are seeing significant growth - with Gmail logging an increase of 76%, and its companion network, Google Buzz, spiking, up 296% from the previous 90 day period. Sharing from AddThis to Buzz was good enough for #22 overall, just ahead of others including LinkedIn, Tumblr and Wordpress.

It's tempting to write off the blip as nothing more than a blip - a rule of small numbers. After all, the total percentage of shares to Google Buzz from AddThis totaled .25%, or 1 of every 400 shares. The top 10 services, comprising of Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print, Google, MySpace, Favorites, StumbleUpon, Messenger and Delicious, comprise more than 85% of all shares, leaving scraps for the remaining services - and one knows Google services aren't supposed to be "also rans" outside the top ten in most cases.


To dig deeper into the surprising data, I asked AddThis for more clarification.

While the company doesn't yet expose absolute sharing statistics, they reported that the rise in both Google Buzz and its companion Gmail is likely a recovery after a slow summer. The spike in Buzz propels it to the 5th most popular social network overall.


"Kids are back in school and sharing up a storm," wrote Justin Thorp, Community Manager for AddThis. "But... even with that, Gmail & Google Buzz are still seeing growth, usage, and excitement."

Aside from the 3-month bump, Thorp reports that StumbleUpon "has been the one that's seen some of the most continuous" growth.


Additional AddThis details on Google Buzz reveal that after the United States, which leads by a large margin, the next most active countries sharing to Buzz via AddThis are the Netherlands, India, Russia, Brazil, Germany, China, Canada, the UK, and France.

In contrast, the long since purchased, but still active, FriendFeed statistics show Turkey far outpacing the United States, followed by Italy, India and Pakistan.

While the world awaits Google's next round of social updates, long rumored, but still unclear, the loyal Buzz community eagerly awaits any signs of good news that show engagement and activity in the much-dismissed social sharing network. AddThis' statistics give a glimmer of hope, even if it is small numbers relative to other social tech titans.

AddThis, the sharing and bookmarking utility that lets users share interesting content from the Web to more than 150 different services, introduced a new Service Directory today, enabling any user or service provider to be submitted as a potential partner. In parallel, the company debuted a slew of statistical upgrades, highlighting the most popularly used networks, including how networks are faring across the world. For example, while Facebook is the dominant sharing service overall, including in the United States, countries including Brazil and China see more bookmarking, and South Koreans prefer to print.

According to AddThis, fully half of all shares on the service come from three options, namely: 1) Facebook (28%), 2) E-mail (14%) and 3) Adding to favorites (9%). Rounding out the top ten globally, from the last 30 days of data were 4) Print (9%), 5) MySpace (8%), 6) Twitter (8%), 7) Google (6%), 8) Digg (4%), 9) Microsoft Live (4%) and 10) Delicious (3%)


The total percentage of shares from the top ten services is a whopping 93%, leaving only 7% of all shares for the remaining 140+ services in the long, long tail. But this didn't stop a multitude of services from asking AddThis to well... add them. In a press release this morning, the company said the debut of the Service Directory was in response to a "flood of incoming requests" from "people around the world asking for their favorite sites to be added".

You can also use AddThis' Service Directory to see how specific services are more popular in one region of the world as another.


With the launch of the Service Directory, AddThis is expecting users and providers to send new bookmarking and social news platforms their way. You can check it out at http://www.addthis.com/services, which also provides a handy jumping-off point for seeing just which countries have social networking sites above utilities like printing, and just how worldwide the reach of Facebook really is.