ShareThrough

Dan Greenberg was a graduate student at Stanford in the mid-2000s, conducting research at the university's Persuasive Technology Lab under mentor BJ Fog. His work focused on designing for behavior change at scale—exploring how computers could trigger behavioral shifts naturally within user experiences. Around the same time, he and his team built Facebook apps (using FBML) that went viral. These apps featured traditional banner ads and AdSense placements, generating revenue. But watching users click on low-quality ads for teeth whitening and ringtones felt fundamentally wrong to Dan. "That's not a sustainable business model," he realized. The insight crystallized: what if advertising could be respectful, integrated, and modern—earning attention rather than forcing it?

Before even incorporating ShareThrough, Dan and his team were generating "a few hundred thousand" in revenue from their Facebook apps. They reinvested every dollar back into building the company. The core thesis was radical for 2008: ads should fit naturally into the editorial experience, the way Facebook monetized its own feed or Twitter monetized its timeline. Dan wanted to build the software that would let publishers like Rolling Stone, Hearst, ABC News, and Disney power native advertising across their own sites and apps. The company launched in 2008—a terrible year economically, but it insulated ShareThrough from the crash mentality. They were simply building a sustainable, long-term business from day one.

ShareThrough went to market through a combination of direct sales and demand activation. Dan and his early team (including James, who handled content, PR, and inbound) worked to educate the entire ecosystem—media buyers, advertisers, creative agencies, and PR firms—about this new category of "native advertising." The term itself barely existed in 2008. They used content marketing, events, relationships, and PR to position themselves as the alternative to Google and Facebook's existing ad models. Early investors included Mike Maples (Floodgate), Ron Conway, Steve Blank, and other Silicon Valley angels, validating the vision.

The company's success hinged on staying married to the problem, not the solution. Dan explained: "We've reinvented ourselves a bunch of times over the year, but at the core of it it's always been about this problem area of how do you make ads that are integrated." By the time of this interview (roughly 2015-2016), ShareThrough had grown to 200 people with offices in San Francisco, Austin, New York, London, LA, Detroit, Chicago, and Japan. They worked with 1,200 publishers and hundreds of advertisers (major brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, Nestlé, Walmart, Target). The company processed approximately $250 million in gross ad spend annually (up from $140 million the prior year). Their revenue model: a SaaS charge of 25-50 cents CPM for software to manage placements, plus a revenue share on programmatic sales (ranging from low teens to 20% depending on the publisher relationship). This generated $25+ million in annual revenue.

With $30 million raised and growing 100% year-over-year, ShareThrough had positioned itself as the primary alternative to the Google-Facebook duopoly. Dan's vision extended beyond just building a profitable company—he saw ShareThrough as defending journalism, editorial content, and the independent web itself. When asked if a company could scale to $50 billion in this space, Dan reflected philosophically: "By the time someone does build a 50 billion dollar revenue ad business in parallel to Facebook and Google, will it even be on the internet?" He acknowledged that 80% of publisher traffic happens on mobile, in feeds scrolled by thumb. Whether the solution lived on the traditional web or evolved into something entirely new remained uncertain. But the problem—how to preserve quality editorial content and respect user attention—would endure. Dan's parting advice to his 20-year-old self: "Go faster."