AddThis

» see addthis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

addthis was on nearly every article i touched from about 2008 to 2016. i noticed it the way you notice a footer copyright line. it was just there. the little strip of colored icons at the bottom of a post, one for facebook, one for twitter, one for email, sometimes a dropdown with forty more services no one used. i had it embedded on a couple of small blogs i was running out of ankara around 2010 as well. you pasted the js snippet into your template and that was the whole install.

under the hood addthis was two products fused together. one was the share widget itself, free and useful for site owners who did not want to hand-code a facebook share button and then a twitter share button and update them every time a social network changed its api. the other was a tracking pixel that logged everyone who saw the widget, matched them across the 15 million sites the widget was embedded on, and built audience segments for adtech buyers. the free widget was the wrapper for a paid data business.

hooman radfar, austin fath, and dominique vonarburg had spun up the company in vienna, virginia in october 2006 out of an earlier project. sequoia and institutional venture partners backed it. by 2014 it was reporting 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors touched by the widget, which sounded ridiculous until you remembered that pretty much every mid-tier english-language content site had installed it. oracle bought it in january 2016 for around $200 million to feed those audience segments into the oracle data cloud.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the widget landed because it solved a real 2007 problem. digg and stumbleupon were huge, delicious was still a going concern, and every site owner wanted a share button for each of them. addthis let you drop in one row that would render buttons for the top handful and expose the long tail behind a plus sign. by 2010 you could hardly find a wordpress theme that did not ship with an addthis or sharethis integration in the sidebar.

for burak-adjacent site operators the appeal was mostly convenience. i did not care about the audience segment side. i just wanted the share row to not be my problem. that made the tracking a quiet exchange. the widget did not display an ad, it displayed share buttons, so it slipped past most ad-blocker lists for years and kept collecting.

~ the fall ~

2014 was the year the tracking layer got a name. a research paper on canvas fingerprinting called out addthis as one of the first companies deploying the technique in the wild. propublica ran a piece and the widget started getting flagged by privacy-focused blockers. addthis said it was an experiment and pulled the feature, but the reputation stuck.

then gdpr arrived in 2018 and did the real damage. suddenly every embed that phoned home to a third-party data cloud needed a consent banner and a granular opt-out. sites in europe started ripping out addthis to simplify their cookie notices. the third-party cookie deprecation from chrome added another year of erosion on top. oracle inherited a business whose fuel supply was drying up.

~ how it actually ended ~

on 1 april 2023 oracle posted a short notice on the marketing cloud site announcing that addthis services would be terminated. the shutdown date was 31 may. no transition offer, no successor product, no ceremony. site owners got about two months to strip the js include from their templates before the widget servers stopped answering. plenty of sites missed the memo and left the dead script in place for months after, still trying to load a domain that no longer resolved.

what remains is a decade of html source with a leftover `

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