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Comment by sam_in_nyc | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not a ploy to get you to visit a site that I'm not at all affiliated with. Rather, I included it in the hopes that people give it a look so that they can answer the question at hand: "how do they make money?"

There are actually three ways to make money. You can sell things, receive money for nothing (donations), or steal. I would have to agree with you that selling goods, services, or ads makes money. So, I wonder, what does AddThis.com sell, and to whom? Or are they just hemorrhaging money on the servers needed to serve (and track) 20b impressions a month?

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They don't sell anything to anyone. The site was acquired and is operated by Clearspring, who has received $36M in funding.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/addthis

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/clearspring

Someone still has to (indirectly?) be making money from this. My guess is that this is a great source of general web analytics data, which someone will pay to have.

Yes, the idea seems to be that they'll gather and monetize the data though I don't think that's sustainable. No one has to make money on this, they could fail while blowing all of their VC money.

All of these widget companies seem like a bit of a scam to me. Do you really need $36M to create a bunch of crappy widgets? I've never even seen a widget from RockYou/Slide/Widgetbox/Clearspring on any of the sites I visit.

So AddThis makes out as the real winner.. they got eaten up by a bigger fish, funded by that sweet VC money, without ever having to prove themselves.

I couldn't agree more with how much money is spent on the lamest things... $36M for widgets. Then again, back in the 90's, people would pay thousands to have a counter installed on their page.

Any idea how much they were acquired for? Google won't tell.

They're both private so we'll probably never know though I doubt the sum was very large. Clearspring isn't doing so hot, I think we'll be seeing a lot of startups like it fizzle out.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/06/clearspring-lays-off-20...

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