Clearspring cites a total of 20 billion views per month for the combined Clearspring and AddThis property, making it one of the web's largest properties in terms of audience.

Monetizing a Button

The AddThis platform, which we also use here on RWW, should be a good fit for Clearspring, though it is not quite clear how Clearspring could monetize the service.

For users, AddThis is simply a convenient way to share and bookmark interesting sites. The problem with this, of course, is that a bookmarking button is extremely hard to monetize. Unlike some of its competitors like delicious or ma.gnolia, AddThis is not a destination site for most of its users, but simply a feature provided by the publisher.

Clearspring is clearly looking to expand its audience, but, as Josh Catone points out, it also gives Clearspring access to an enormous vault of data about sharing on the net, which it could use to build an advertising and marketing platform. Over time, it will be interesting to see how Clearspring plans to integrate these two products.