Clearspring - Your Content. Everywhere.

We’re off to a great start to 2012 with the addition of two major players to our Clearspring sales team! We are excited to welcome media and advertising vet Lee Hoffman as Senior Vice President of Sales and Bryan Weston as  Sales Director, focused specifically on the automotive industry.

Lee now heads our sales and media planning teams, based out of New York.   He comes to us from Cox Digital Solutions where he served as SVP of Media Sales. Previously, he built and managed the Adify Media sales force and has  held leadership positions at AOL, WebMD and L90 Inc. With over 15 years of senior sales management in media and advertising under his belt, he brings a wealth of expertise to his role.

We also welcome Bryan Weston who most recently served as Director of National Accounts at Auto Trader Classics. His wealth of experience from over 20 years in the auto industry are a  huge asset to the Clearspring team where he will be based out of Detroit.

All work and no play makes for a dull holiday season. Enjoy a few rounds of the Clearspring Snowball Showdown. Thanks so much for a great 2011. We’ll see you in 2012!

It’s that time of year again! The response to our AddThis inforgraphic on sharing trends from 2010 was so high, we knew we had to follow up this year. Allow us to introduce trends in sharing for 2011! It’s been an amazing year for us at Clearspring. We’re proud to say AddThis is now on 11 million domains world wide and sees 1.2 billion uniques a month! This wealth of data means more accurate audiences and more efficient targeting for you. As our data sources and resources grow, we continue to dedicate ourselves to helping you make connections and find your audiences. As always, let us know how we can help.

We hope you’ve had a great year, too.  Here’s to 2011 and an even better 2012!

Just a week away from Thanksgiving, we are counting our many blessings here at Clearspring. We’ve just been named among the AlwaysOn 2011 Venture Summit Mid-Atlantic Top 100 for being among the most promising private companies “creating new, vital solutions that will lead to industry disruption and huge value creation.” The honor stems from nominations by several top firms including Morgan Stanley, Technology Partners, DFJ, SAP and KPMG.

It’s great to be recognized, especially on the heels of a very busy past couple of months. In late September, we welcomed Ramsey McGrory, formerly of Yahoo! and RMX as our new CEO. In October, we took a look back at five years of sharing and analytics as we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our social sharing platform, AddThis (check us out in Adweek). Last week, AddThis hit another milestone as the largest social sharing platform  – in a 24 hour period, we saw 3,000,000,000 (that’s 3 billion!) views. And, we recently announced our acquisition of data science company, XGraph. Together, we’ve created the largest multi-graph platform on the open web. By  multi-graph, we mean that our understanding of an audience is multi-dimensional where a single-graph would only represent one dimension of how people are connected (like social ties, for instance). Based on 1.2 billion users, the extensive multi-graph capability has incredible implications for all of our partners across the board.

Whew! It’s been busy and we wouldn’t have it any other way. It couldn’t be more appropriate that all of this comes right before we each take a moment to give thanks. We are incredibly grateful to all of our clients, partners, investors and supporters. Thank you AlwaysOn, those that nominated and voted for us for this honor, and all of you for continuing to keep us motivated and inspired. As always, please reach out and let us know how we can better serve you.

It’s been a very busy week here at Clearspring with the announcement of XGraph joining the family. So busy, we didn’t get a chance to blog about our very first Halloween Costume Contest!

To give a quick rundown from some of our offices — Winnie the Pooh was spotted writing code and the iCloud was shedding “water droplets” all over the floors at HQ in McLean, VA. NYC was was raided by a zombie and a Richard Simmons exercise video extra showed up. LA even saw dead people.

Here are some pictures, including the winners of the three categories – Funniest, Scariest and Most Creative.

HQ’s Elizabeth Leiser won Most Creative with her rendition of the iCloud.

HQ’s Collin Hughes won Funniest for dressing up as fellow Clearspringer Ted Pearson. Here’s a reference:

LA’s Will Watson won Scariest for his interpretation of Dia de Los Muertos.

Some honorable mentions:

Rebecca Salerno of our NYC office dressed as a hostess turned zombie. She has rats in her hair!

NYC’s David S. just got back from filming his latest exercise video with Richard Simmons.

Charlie the Pooh.

We’re excited to announce that Clearspring has acquired XGraph.

XGraph is the leading data science company focused on modeling web-wide connections between people.  Clearspring’s scalable data processing and massive reach via AddThis coupled with XGraph’s technology create the largest multi-graph platform on the open web—mapping 1.2 billion user’s connections by brand affiliation, intent and social behavior.

The social graph, the data structure that maps the connections we have with our friends, has taken the web by storm.  This has proven to be a powerful platform, but this single graph only represents one dimension of how we are connected to one another.   XGraph not only models these social connections, but also multiple other types of connections such as how we are related by brand affiliations, intent and more.  This is the multi-graph.

With our new multi-graph platform, Clearspring has a truly differentiated capability to deliver powerful results to our advertisers and publishers.  For advertisers, agencies and trading desks, we will immediately be able to provide the only scaled multi-graph audience targeting capabilities available on the web.  For publishers, we will use this same graph platform to enable deeper audience insight, monetization and actionable data products in the near future.  And, that’s just the beginning.

Thank you, as always, to our customers, partners and investors for making this possible. Welcome XGraph into the Clearspring family!

This month, we celebrate five years of sharing with AddThis.  It began with a simple idea – make bookmarking and sharing easier.  After a few months of coding, AddThis was born.  At first, it was a single bookmarking button used by a few small publishers.  It quickly spread across the web and we started to see some interesting trends in how and what people share.  With that information in hand, we introduced sharing analytics to offer this same insight to publishers.

Thank you so much for your loyalty and support over these last five years. It’s been an amazing ride and we are excited to work with you to have an even better next five years.  In honor of our birthday, please enjoy this tasty infographic that captures some of what we’ve learned about sharing over the last half decade.  Enjoy!

Today, we’re taking Clearspring to the next level.  I am excited to welcome Ramsey McGrory on as our new CEO. Ramsey joins us from Yahoo! where he led Right Media, the pioneer in the online ad exchange business. From 2004 to 2011 he was with them from start-up what is now a $1 billion annual revenue business. His deep understanding of advertising and data, coupled with a demonstrated ability to deliver value to publishers, advertisers and consumers make him an invaluable addition.  Together with our already impressive team, board and investors, we’re confident that this move will help us continue our fantastic growth by better serving our customers.

We have experienced phenomenal growth since our first investor came on in 2006.. AddThis is the now web’s largest sharing platform used by over 9 million publishers, reaching more than 1 billion people worldwide.  We process as much data in one week as the Library of Congress.  Launched just last year, our Audience Platform leverages data from AddThis to enable hundreds of brands like AT&T and Sony to connect with hundreds of millions of socially-connected users via real-time advertising.  And this growth has been recognized.  Last week we were named to Business Insider’s Digital 100 Most Valuable Start-ups on the heels of making the Inc500 and AlwaysOn Global 250 Top Private Companies.

We’re at an inflection point.  If we continue this growth, we will open up opportunities to serve our customers at a scale we never imagined.  To date, we’ve been lucky to bring on amazing people and partners to support our scaling efforts.  Our leadership has helped grown the team over 100% in the first half of this year.  We are proud to have Springers in McLean, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, Lancaster, New Jersey, Atlanta and even India.  This spring, IVP joined our already-impressive investor team by leading our $20 million Series D financing.  With Ramsey on board, we believe that we can now not only keep this pace, but have the ability to go even faster.

As for me, I will now be Executive Chairman and work closely with Ramsey and team.  In this new role, I will steer the board and product and marketing operations.  AddThis was viewed approximately 2.86 billion times last Monday.  If each user viewed the page they visited for at least a second, that’s over 90 collective years of human attention that we saw that day alone.  I’m looking forward to figuring out ways to unlock this data to make a better web for us all.

As always, we welcome your feedback on how we’re doing and what else you’d like to see from us. We hope that you’re as excited about these changes as we are at Clearspring.  Welcome, Ramsey!

They say things come in three’s! Today, we’re proud to be named to Business Insider’s Digital 100, placing us among the world’s top 100 startups on the web. In great company, we proudly join the ranks of some our sister companies like GroupOn, LivingSocial, MediaBank and BuddyMedia. Having recently been listed in the AlwaysOn Global 250 and Inc500, this rounds out a hat trick we couldn’t be happier to complete. We’re so appreciative of the amazing growth we’ve experienced. It’s icing on the cake to have it acknowledged! A huge thank you to all of our publishers and advertisers for helping us get here. As always, we’re humbled to be at your service. Here’s to you – It’s back to work for us!

Last week was my first week here at Clearspring and already I feel like a part of the family.  Maybe it’s the daily catered lunches or the Wii Tennis Tournament we had on Friday (Jeff and I clinched 2nd place!) or perhaps it’s because my desk is right next to the snack table (don’t worry, I don’t judge!) — but whatever the reason, everyone’s made a genuine effort to introduce themselves and make me feel at home.

As with most new jobs, the first week consists of trying to learn new names with faces to match, who does what, where you need to be when, and the ins and outs of how to get this or that done.  Lucky for me, my coworkers made that (typically overwhelming) experience an absolute joy  — I don’t know that I’ve ever walked into a new job and felt so welcomed!

What I love is there’s a clear “work-hard, play-hard” aura in the office and it’s evident how much Clearspring employees enjoy their jobs.  Knowing that I’ll be working with people who exude such positive energy combined with seasoned skills, talents, knowledge, experience and passion is both refreshing and motivating.

I’m extremely happy with this opportunity to work with such an excellent team, and I look forward to learning from them and sharing that knowledge with you!

Cheers,
Elizabeth

Elizabeth@clearspring.com

twitter.com/AddThisMaven