This morning Clearspring officially announced that they will soon deprecate the company’s Launchpad widget platform, integrating features directly into AddThis which will become Clearspring’s central platform. The shift makes a ton of sense, as the concept of “widgets” doesn’t resonate as strongly with users as “sharing” does. While Facebook and other social platforms want to be a centralized place for the content a user shares, AddThis serves as the sharing switchboard.
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After acquiring AddThis last year, Clearspring set out to grow its own web presence and make its media-sharing tools as accessible as possible to social media users across the globe. We’ve received an update from Clearspring, following up on its acquisition. So far, the follow-up looks good, and provides an encouraging look at Clearpring’s swift integration of the AddThis distribution platform for sharing web content.

Clearspring cites the April comScore report showing a great deal of growth, reaching over half a billion people. That’s up from the 200 million web users Clearspring reached prior to the acquisition of AddThis, more than doubling its web presence.
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Despite an economic downturn Clearspring is one company that continues to proceed full steam ahead. Today Clearspring announced that they had acquired AddThis, a bookmarking widget which has built a massive reach since their launch in September 2006. The combined reach of these two companies is now more than 200 million unique visitors with over 20 billion monthly views. What does this mean for Clearspring in the short-term?

Probably nothing substantial aside from expanding their reach as the leading widget distribution platform. In the long-run there are some definite implications. The most obvious implication is the ability for Clearspring to increase the companies ability to distribute multiple forms of content which was previously not “widgetized”.

The second most significant implication is the ability of the company to build new products on the back of AddThis. With more than 20 billion impressions per month, there is substantial data that AddThis has available to them which is currently not being leveraged. Want to know what the most popular content on the web is? Check out all those sites with the AddThis widget and learn what is being shared most.

Not only does AddThis let users share but it also enables users to bookmark making it a competitor to Yahoo’s popular bookmarking service: delicious. This one small button will most definitely have a big impact on the company in the long-term as sharing among content distribution platforms continues to surge across the web.

Clearspring previously had approximately 120 million monthly unique visitors which means this has increased the company’s monthly reach by approximately 67 percent. As I mentioned earlier, this widget enables Clearspring to now distribute both widgetized content and non-widgetized content throughout the web. Ted Leonsis said that this will help connect “digital content publishers and consumers via a single set of universally recognizable tools”.

It will be interesting to see what sort of long-term impact this acquisition has for Clearpsring.

D.C. based Clearspring, raised a third round of funding for $18 million led by New Enterprise Associates. The company has raised $35 million so far and is expanding rapidly. The company also recently launched an ad network which displays dynamic advertising on the millions of widgets that it currently displays around the web. Widgets are a hot item right now, almost as hot as social applications.

Joseph Weisenthal asked Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, about his thoughts on the health of the current ecosystem. Hooman’s response was that, “You literally can’t have as many companies that there are.” So what is Clearspring going to do with the cash in their bank account? They’ll be making acquisitions of a number of companies.

There will also be a strengthening of alliances among the leaders in this space. Currently, Slide and RockYou are the other leaders but they also extend over to social applications. There has been buzz surrounding RockYou’s latest round of funding as they try to get a serious amount of cash on the heels of Slide’s $50 million round. The word on the street is that they are having some trouble getting favorable terms and will have to consider doing a smaller round.

Look for a substantial amount of consolidation in this space over the coming months.