Widget-Maker Clearspring To Buy Web-Sharing Firm

Clearspring Technologies, an online widget maker, is buying AddThis, a bookmarking and content-sharing service, creating a combined company with broad reach across the Internet, the firms announced yesterday.

Clearspring of McLean makes mini-applications such as games, slideshows and news feeds that can be added to Web sites, helping people distribute content across many networks. AddThis of Princeton, N.J., makes a widely used tool for bookmarking and sharing Web pages.

"What we are building is the next-generation universal-sharing platform," said Ted Leonsis, Clearspring chairman and an investor in the company.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The two companies, which combined have less than $10 million in annual revenue, will employ 100 people at Clearspring's Tysons Corner offices, Leonsis said. He said he expected the company to be profitable soon.

Together, the companies claim 200 million visitors a month to the content created with their products.

"We see the business . . . becoming very, very profitable." Leonsis said. "There are no marketing costs. It's a socially distributed business."

Clearspring has been built with $35 million in investor money, Leonsis said. Clearspring's investors include New Enterprise Associates, a Baltimore venture capital firm, which has put up $20 million. In addition to Leonsis, other major investors include former AOL chairman Steve Case, Capital One co-founder Nigel Morris and former AOL senior vice president Miles Gilburne.

Dom Vonarburg, chief executive of AddThis, said he liked Clearspring's management and its "scalable" infrastructure.

Vonarburg added, "Clearspring brings tremendous value to AddThis."

The sharing of Web sites, services, and other digital content as a way of communicating is growing in popularity, especially among the rapidly expanding social-networking segment. In August, ComScore, which measures Internet traffic, said social-networking users comprised more than 65 percent of the Web's 860 million unique monthly visitors.

Clearspring and AddThis enable people to easily share content with trusted friends and social groups across popular sites like Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Twitter and Digg. Shared content includes Web pages, videos, movie trailers, news, sports updates, trivia quizzes, games and music.

AddThis is on hundreds of thousands of Web sites, including those for Time magazine, Oracle, TechCrunch, Freewebs, Entertainment Weekly, MySpace, FOX, ABC and Glamour.