Mashable announces the beginning of a long-term partnership with company, 360i. As part of the agreement, Mashable is sharing access to its marketing tool, Velocity, for the first time. Velocity can predict what content will be popular, which allows a company to create strategic marketing plans. Notable clients of 360i include Hanes, Toyota and HBO. They are also behind the popular “You can still dunk in the dark” Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet. Financial terms of the partnership are not available to the public.
Mashable

New site design Launches
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.
CNN may buy Mashable, but not for $200M
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.
Report: CNN will buy Mashable for $200 million
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon reports that an unnamed source told him that CNN will buy Mashable for more than $200 million. The source says an announcement is expected for Tuesday (May 15). The New York Times reports that CNN denied that such an announcement would be made this week and declined to comment on the potential acquisition. Mashable, too, declined to comment. However, the Times reports that three people with knowlege of the talks said that CNN and Mashable are in advanced talks that may lead to its acquisition.
Cashmore e-mails his staff to say that the “rumor going around on Twitter that Mashable will be acquired this week” was not true.
Site expands coverage, Ulanoff joins
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.
Protected: Mashable Connect Conference
Awards renamed: Annual Mashable Awards
The annual awards are renamed the Annual Mashable Awards and the 4th contest is launched.
Cashmore on PBS to discuss Facebook privacy
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 joins
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 on open devices
Cashmore discusses the debate around open vs. closed web, and Facebook’s new Open Graph initiative and how it could hurt Google.
Opens New York HQ
Mashable hosts a Headquarters Warming Partyat 92Y Tribeca, New York.
iPad app released
Mashable is released as a iPad App. The app was developed by Intridea.
At SXSW, Cashmore talks Mashable startup and location-based services
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.
Site down
The site experiences and outage. Management responds that the business is operating normally, but that some users have been affected.
Cashmore ‘Planet’s Sexiest Geek’
Gawker runs a photo story naming Cashmore as the “Planet’s Sexiest Geek”.
Cashmore: Media becoming social – social becoming media
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.
Cashmore “King of Twitter”
Cashmore is crowned the most influential Briton on Twitter. His Twitter feed has 1.8 million followers, followed by Stephen Fry, who has 1.1 million followers and Russell Brand. INQ Mobile calculated the “influence rating” of Twitter users by measuring the number of times they tweeted, how good they were at re-tweeting other people’s messages, and the number of times their posts were re-tweeted by other people.
Cashmore also topped the list of influential Gloabll twitter users, followed by P Diddy, Stephen Fry, Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian.
Third Open Web Award winners
The winners include Pandora, Fish Wrangler (a Facebook game), and “Surprise Marriage Proposal in Spain” as best YouTube video.
Time: Best blogs of 2009
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.
Inc Mag: Cashmore “Brad Pitt of the blogosphere
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.
Mashable overtakes TechCrunch as leading Tech blog
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.
Second Open Web Award winners
Winners include Encyclopedia Dramatica in the wiki category, Digg, Netlog and MySpace.
First Open Web Award winners
The winners of the first Open Web Awards are announced. Winners include Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, ESPN, Cafemom and Pandora.
First ad deal
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.
Launch
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.