ShareThis Names Paul Lentz SVP of Publisher Platform

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 9, 2012) - ShareThis, one of the largest platforms for sharing across the Web, today announced the appointment of Paul Lentz as Senior Vice President of Publisher Platform. ShareThis reaches more than 80 percent of the US population online¹ across more than 1.3 million websites, and has built its business around the content that inspires sharing and the audiences that socialize it. The company's platform drives economic value for the entire online content ecosystem with innovative products such as the Social Quality Index, a new methodology to measure the social quality of sites across the Web.

"We look at our publishers as strong partners, and enabling the proliferation of premium, quality content is central to our business," said Kurt Abrahamson, CEO of ShareThis. "Paul has had his feet firmly planted in the interactive publishing space for years. He brings an incredibly valuable perspective that will enable us to align product development with publishers' needs."

Lentz comes to ShareThis from CBS Interactive, where he led business development and strategy for the CBSNews.com and CNET divisions. Prior to that, he held several senior management positions within CBS Interactive, most recently leading strategic partnerships, planning and metrics, and overseeing content licensing and e-commerce initiatives.

"ShareThis has the opportunity to transform the way digital media is sold beyond click-throughs and CPMs," Lentz said. "We have a trove of social and sharing data around content that will be a boon to premium publishers as they seek ways to continue creating quality content, monetize, and maintain their value in the marketplace."

Lentz joins the company as it creates new ways to provide publishers with tools and analytics that measure content performance, competitive intelligence to benchmark that performance among their peers, and the ability to more effectively monetize. ShareThis recently unveiled Social Quality Index (SQI) is a lynchpin of this initiative.

SQI is the first measure of Web-wide sharing activity, providing advertisers and publishers with site rankings across 27 different site categories. The standard places a quantifiable value on the social activity that occurs around content, enabling advertisers to reach more engaged audiences and publishers to extract a premium from the social quality of their content.

ShareThis was recently named one of America's 100 Most Promising Companies by Forbes magazine and was included in AlwaysON's Top 100 Private Companies in Digital Media for the third year running. The company is the number one ranked distributed content entity -- ahead of Google, Facebook and Yahoo! -- and reaches more than 180 million US uniques monthly (comScore Media Metrix Key Measures Report Ad-Focus Category with duplication and excluding Custom Entities and Advertising Networks, December 2011).

About ShareThis
ShareThis is one of the largest and most innovative platforms for sharing across the Web. Designed around social media -- both the content that inspires sharing and the audiences that socialize it -- the company's platform allows for direct relationships with the key players in the advertising ecosystem: publishers, advertisers, and consumers. ShareThis enables publishers to offer popular content sharing features which foster increased usage and engagement while providing advertisers effective ad targeting capabilities and analytics derived from sharing activity. Based in Palo Alto, CA, with offices in New York and Cincinnati, ShareThis is privately held with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blue Chip Venture Company, DFJ Mercury, Illinois Ventures, Matthew Pritzker Company, Queen City Angels, RPM Ventures and Reservoir Partners.

¹ comScore Media Metrix Key Measures Report, December 2011