Clearspring Technologies is a widget company that generates revenue through a Widget Ad Network.  The company announced this morning that they have acquired AddThis.  AddThis is a bookmarking button that appears alongside many blog and online news publications.  AddThis also appears on the homepage of Pulse 2.0 at the bottom left where it says “Bookmark.”  AddThis has about 200 million users and 300,000 publishers.  Clearspring aims to become the leading content sharing widget. 

I first wrote about AddThis in October 2006.  AddThis is based in Princeton, New Jersey.  AddThis is also used on sites like TIME Magazine, Oracle, EW, Topix, Lonely Planet, PGA Tour, Tower Records, FOX, ABC, CBS, America Idol, Glamour, and WebMD.  The AddThis button is loaded 20 billion times per month.

Dom Vonarburg is the Founder and CEO of AddThis.  The company officially launched at DEMO 2006. Although the acquisition price is not known, AllThingsD predicts that the amount was for a few million and some form of stock swap.  AddThis’ main competition is ShareTHis and Del.icio.us.  Clearspring makes about $10 million in revenue per year and believes that they can use AddThis for advertising purposes and data analytics.

Clearspring also has about $35 million in funding since they started in 2004.  Investors in Clearspring include Steve Case, and New Enteprise Associates. 

On October 2nd, AddThis Beta was launched. WebProNews recently published a Q&A session with co-founder of AddThis, Dom Vonarburg. Vonarburg told his interviewer that AddThis.com is a “brand new service that helps web surfers collect information online with a single click, and send it to their favorite bookmarking service, feed reader, wish list service, podcast service, etc.”

Sounds a little bit like “Digg This,” right? But Vonarburg insists that AddThis is different because “it is the first service to provide a generic gateway for collecting and distributing many different types of content. AddThis acts as a bridge between the web publisher, the web user, and the social media services.”

AddThis offers two services. The first is the AddThis Browser buttons which facilitates Net surfers in bookmarking any website, subscribing to any feed, collecting product info, importing podcasts, and sending content from the feeds to personalized websites such as My Yahoo! The other service AddThis offers is AddThis Web buttons which accomodates web distributers. AddThis Web buttons can be added to blogs so that visitors can add your feeds to visitor bookmarks or personalized pages. This is similar to the “Digg This.” Here’s a screenshot below of what AddThis Web buttons look like:

AddThis.com is a product of AddThis LLC and is based in Princeton, NJ.  AddThis launched at DEMOfall 2006.

If you are a Digg user, what is you opinion on AddThis? Do you think it will be a hit or bust?