Mashable

The new design features a social “start page,” which organizes content based on social activity. As new content trends higher, it moves to the “What’s Hot” column. Because images are shared eight times more than links, image, video and text elements are individually shareable. Articles now have higher-quality images, curated and selected by a new full-time image editor.

CASHMORE: We will always look for ways to influence sharing versus cramming stories with keywords.

To address mobile users, which account for 30 % of readers on 2,800 unique devices, Cashmore says:

CASHMORE: What we’re doing is if people are consuming on the mobile web we need to make our mobile site amazing and if they’re coming from Twitter and Facebook, we need to make that experience a good one too. If your website isn’t as fun on these devices, [readers] might go elsewhere, which is why packaging is going to be big in 2013.

Advertising will now be primarily “native,” or custom ads, rather than display.

When rumors of CNN buying Mashable first surfaced in March the purchase amount was thought to be upwards of $200 million, but now that figure is said to be much lower. Executives are said to be working on a deal with CNN, and that it’s about 80 percent likely to close. The company now generates more than 50 million monthly page views.

Mashable expands coverage to include new sections for entertainment, U.S. news and world news, and that it was hiring a veteran technology editor to oversee all editorial content. The site’s redesigned homepage, unveiled today, features tabs for the new sections alongside the existing content channels for social media, technology and business.

Mashable has 15 million unique visitors monthly. Its growth has been spurred by the estimated four million people who use social media to follow Mashable’s content and share it with their personal networks on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other social sites.

Lance Ulanoff joins as Editor in Chief, responsible for editorial direction and strategy. Ulanoff is a 25-year industry veteran and award-winning journalist. Prior to Mashable, he served as Senior Vice President of Content and Editor-In-Chief of PCMag.Com at Ziff Davis Media Inc. where he oversaw content strategy for all Ziff Davis websites.

The annual awards are renamed the Annual Mashable Awards and the 4th contest is launched.

Cashmore appears on PBS today to discuss Facebook’s response to the user backlash against its privacy settings. While he agrees that Facebook’s decision to simplify privacy settings was a good one, he thinks the company should have gone a step further and made its Instant Personalization feature opt-in instead of opt-out.

Vadim Lavrusik, Social Media Journalist, leaves the New York Times to join Mashable as Community Manager, responsible for “engaging readers on-site and off, creating programs and strategies for making outreach more effective, cultivating an environment for a strong community, identifying emerging social platforms to build a presence on, and of course, writing.”

Cashmore discusses the debate around open vs. closed web, and Facebook’s new Open Graph initiative and how it could hurt Google.

Mashable hosts a Headquarters Warming Partyat 92Y Tribeca, New York.

Mashable is released as a iPad App. The app was developed by Intridea.

At South by SouthWest in Austin, Texas, Cashmore talks about Mashable’s startup and new location-based services from companies like Foursquare.

CASHMORE: The community is the distribution channel. If you give the readers something good they’ll push that out to their friends.

The site experiences and outage. Management responds that the business is operating normally, but that some users have been affected.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Cashmore notes social convergence:

Social media is becoming the web, and social media is becoming the media. It’s been a nice area to be covering these last few years, and we’ve been able to grow as a blog alongside it. There’s very little on the web that hasn’t had this social element built in to it. It’s integrated in to every site you use now.

The site has 15 full-time bloggers and 50 regular contributors.

The winners include Pandora, Fish Wrangler (a Facebook game), and “Surprise Marriage Proposal in Spain” as best YouTube video.

Time magazine rates Mashable as one of the best blogs of 2009, noting that it not only provides news about Web 2.0 companies, but also gives readers useful technology tips.

In its “30 under 30” feature Inc Magazine describes Cashmore as the “Brad Pitt of the blogosphere”.

The site has 7.8 million unique visitors and 12 million page views a month.

According to Martin Bryant, Mashable has overtaken TechCrunch because Mashable is more about internet culture than pure tech news these days.

BRYANT: Sure – there’s lots of tech news (and some great analysis) in there as well but if there’s a hot celebrity story trending on Twitter they’ll find a way of covering it to reap the search engine traffic, if there’s a viral video doing well they’ll embed it to get the retweets.

Winners include Encyclopedia Dramatica in the wiki category, Digg, Netlog and MySpace.

The winners of the first Open Web Awards are announced. Winners include Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, ESPN, Cafemom and Pandora.

Mashable sells its first ad:

CASHMORE: We did our first ad deal. It was only a few thousand per month, but it kind of legitimized blogging as a business. Selling a first ad legitimized that this may go somewhere — this may actually work.

Pete Cashmore launches the site on WordPress from his home in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is 19 years old.

The earliest posts on The Internet Archive is from Jul 25, 2012. The site’s slogan is “The latest trends. Cool hunting. The future. Fast news for early-adopters.”

Cashmore worked as a Web consultant for a short time before he started the site.