What are AddThis Sharing Endpoints?

Overview

AddThis offers a set of URL endpoints that allow you to share content from your website to any of our supported destination services. If you don’t want to, or can’t, use the AddThis JavaScript in-page tools (our Client API), you can just link to these server endpoints directly. Just send the user’s browser to these endpoints and AddThis’ backend will put the user through the appropriate destination-specific sharing process.

Here’s what the HTML looks like:

<a href="http://0-api.addthis.com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/oexchange/0.8/offer?url=https://0-www-addthis-com.librarycatalog.vts.edu" rel="nofollow">this link</a>

<a href="http://0-api.addthis.com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/oexchange/0.8/forward/facebook/offer?url=https://0-www-addthis-com.librarycatalog.vts.edu" rel="nofollow">this one</a>

The endpoints give you a uniform URL pattern, regardless of the destination (this pattern is oexchange-compliant). You control the client side — simple HTML links, fancy buttons and UI treatments, Flash applications, or any other technique you can use to call out to a browser. You have full control over the user experience, but still have access to the broad set of destination services and publisher analytics that the AddThis platform offers.

Note: These endpoints are intended to be called directly by browsers and are designed for user interaction, and therefore cannot be called by scripts or backend services. We strongly recommend adding rel="nofollow" attributes to your HTML tags, otherwise search engine crawlers who follow your sharing api links can generate false shares in your analytics reports.

Unsupported Sharing Endpoint Services: Print, Favorites, Email App.

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Endpoint Specification

All sharing endpoints are rooted at, and begin with:

http://0-api.addthis.com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/oexchange/0.8

Share Menu

This endpoint renders a full-page sharing menu with buttons for all of our destination services. Use this endpoint when you know which URL is being shared, and you want to prompt the user with a set of possible destinations.

• Endpoint: /offer
• Example: http://0-api.addthis.com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/oexchange/0.8/offer?url=https://www.addthis.com (try it!)

Parameters:

Name	Description	Type	Required?	Example
url	URL of the page being shared.	string	yes	https://www.addthis.com
title	Title of the page being shared.	string	no	AddThis Home Page
description	Short description of the page being shared.	string	no	AddThis: One button. Your content everywhere.
pubid	Your publisher profile ID (used to attribute shares, in your analytics).	string	no	addthis
shortener	The shortening service used to shorten URLs.	string	no	bitly

Share Forward

This endpoint redirects the browser to the specified site to complete a share. Use this endpoint when you know which URL is being shared and the desired destination. Pass the destination service code on the url path as shown.

• Endpoint: /forward/SERVICE_CODE/offer
• Example: http://0-api.addthis.com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/oexchange/0.8/forward/facebook/offer?url=https://www.addthis.com (try it!)

SERVICE_CODE is just the short code for a supported service, as listed here.

Parameters:

Name	Description	Type	Required?	Example
url	URL of the page being shared.	string	yes	https://www.addthis.com
title	Title of the page being shared.	string	no	AddThis Home Page
description	Short description of the page being shared.	string	no	AddThis: One button. Your content everywhere.
screenshot	The URL of an image that can be used to show a preview of the page being shared	string	no	http://www.example.com/img/preview2374.png
pubid	Your publisher profile ID (used to attribute shares, in your analytics).	string	no	addthis
email_template	Email template to use for email sharing (requires pubid param)	string	no	my_template
ct	Enable click tracking (shared page must have AddThis client code to measure clicks)	string	no	ct=1

Note: The template parameter has been deprecated in favor of the new Twitter intents parameters which are documented below.

Calling the Endpoints from Flash

These endpoints are extremely easy to integrate into Flash applications. Take a look at this guide for detail and example code.

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Sharing Flash Content

The simplest way to call the endpoints is by passing a URL to a web resource. This URL can contain embedded Flash content, as described in this guide.

Specifying Flash Content Directly

In addition to operating on on-page tags, both versions of the endpoints also accept additional parameters to allow passing Flash object information directly, in cases where you can’t decorate the page as is usually recommended.

Flash-Content Parameters

Name	Description	Example
screenshot	The URL of an image that can be used to show a preview of the page being shared	http://www.example.com/img/preview2374.png
swfurl	The URL of a Flash SWF to be shared(height and width are required if you provide this)	http://www.example.com/assets/flash/mycoolflashthingy.swf
height	The ideal height of the Flash object	300
width	The ideal height of the Flash object	500

URL Shortening

*effective May 1, 2020

We will automatically shorten urls shared to twitter if they’re longer than 40 chars. If you like you can request url shortening on any share using our endpoints. Simply add the shortener=bitly parameter to your request and we will shorten your shared url with bit.ly before passing it to the destination. You can also shorten with your bitly account by completing the following steps:

1. Log into your bitly.com account.
2. Click on Profile Settings, navigate to ‘Registered OAuth Applications,’ click ‘Register New App,’ then wait for the confirmation email from Bitly.
3. Click the link from the Bitly email, and set up your new application with these options:
   Application Name: AddThis
   Application Link: https://www.addthis.com
   Redirect URIs: https://0-www-addthis-com.librarycatalog.vts.edu/darkseid/publisher/bitly-oauth-token (Note: it is very important to get this value exactly correct)
   Description: AddThis Tools Link Shortening
4. Open the Bitly Application that you just created. Copy the Client ID and Secret from that screen. Then log into your addthis.com dashboard, click on Profile Settings, navigate to Link Shortening, and enter the Client ID and Secret in the corresponding fields.
5. Click on ‘Save and Authorize,’ which will take you to a confirmation on bitly.com. Approve the request.

That’s it. From now on, when links to your pages are shortened by AddThis tools, those links will show up in your Bitly account.

Rate Limiting

Requests will be rate limited at 1000 requests/hour per ip address.

Sharing to Twitter

You can customize your Twitter shares with a few extra parameters on your request (optional). These parameters are passed through to Twitter and work as described in their web intents specification.

Optional Twitter Parameters

Name	Description	Example
title	Text to show in the tweet, instead of the link’s title.	Check out this link
via	A Twitter account which is appended to your tweet like: “[text] [url] via @[via]”	addthis
related	Comma separated list of related twitter accounts, suggested to the user after they tweet.	clearspring,numbakrrunch

Note: To use these options you must not pass the template parameter which has been deprecated.