Though the measurement techniques for these kinds of syndicated Web tools are in flux, the McLean, Va.-based Clearspring has more than one billion monthly unique visitors, which it says beats competitors such as ShareThis and Meebo.

Clearspring co-founder and CEO Hooman Radfar said his company opened this year with its first profitable quarter, and that it will bring in tens of millions in revenue annually, “tripling this year and accelerating.” Radfar attested that he doesn’t need the new funding to operate, but rather plans to spend it on acquisitions.

What does he want to buy? Start-ups that “leverage data and build audiences more efficiently,” Radfar said. “We’re trying to look at companies that are younger and earlier than us but don’t have millions to build the real-time infrastructure we’ve built.”

Radfar said that beyond its current advertising business, Clearspring is poised to take advantage of all the data about users and content that passes through its system. “Data is the most valuable outcome of the social web,” he said.

Interestingly, Radfar observed that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s new company AVOS, which bought Delicious and a social media marketing company, sounds like it’s heading down a similar path of analyzing real-time audience data.

ShareThis, one of the largest online widget providers, recently doubled its conversion rates by implementing OAuth, the open standard for authorizing access to a user’s Web accounts.

With OAuth, readers can share a page directly from a ShareThis publisher’s site, rather than leaving the page to go log into a social network. They can also share to more than one service simultaneously. Then, their log-in information and preferences can be easily accessed on new sites that also use ShareThis with OAuth.

In tests with about 10 percent of ShareThis users, users that clicked on a “share” button and then actually shared that content grew to 16.4 percent versus 8.5 percent where users had to type in their credentials.

ShareThis is now extending OAuth as an option to all its publishers. The company predicts that due to network effects across its one million participating sites, conversion numbers may increase again.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto, Calif.-based ShareThis shared some other stats with us.

ComScore ranked ShareThis its No. 1 U.S. widget or application provider in March, with 172 million unique visitors. That beat out rival Clearspring, which had 159 million uniques.

In addition, ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel said his company’s revenue is growing 100 percent each quarter and his team is growing rapidly: the ShareThis staff grew to 50 from 35 in just the last two months. A couple of recent snags are chief scientist Yan Qu from AOL and chief architect of advertising systems Prasanta Behera from Yahoo.

It’s not all rah-rah-sis-boom-bah for ShareThis over here; NetworkEffect also plans to check in with Clearspring for an update this week.

In a move to dramatically increase its traffic and give it more tools to offer publishers, Clearspring Technologies said it will acquire AddThis, the top bookmarking and content-sharing tool on the Web.

As with many social-networking start-ups, whether this disparate traffic can be easily translated into a reliable revenue-generating business remains to be seen.

The McLean, Va.-based Clearspring–one of several widget networks seeking to connect publishers and advertisers with social tools by helping them embed small pieces of content across the Web and monetize that content–would not disclose the price it paid for the Princeton, N.J.-based AddThis.

My guess: A few million dollars in cash and maybe more in some kind of stock swap.

What exactly is Clearspring getting for this?

For starters, a tiny icon with a lot of popularity to help it toward its goal of being the universal sharing standard in the new socially-networked Web paradigm.

Clearspring claims the pair together will reach 20 billion views per month and more than 200 million unique visitors, noting it would now have a “worldwide audience comparable to the seventh largest Web property.”

While adding up such piecemeal traffic is not quite the same to advertisers as a major central Web site like Yahoo (YHOO), for example, AddThis is the most used tool for sharing Web pages through email or from Web site to Web site.

Its main competitors are ShareThis and Yahoo’s Del.icio.us, even though it has only a handful of employees.

Of course, that viral success around universal sharing might not mean massive revenue generation, even if it is a popular consumer tool.

But Ted Leonsis, chairman of the board at Clearspring, and CEO Hooman Radfar said revenue would come via advertising and, eventually, valuable data analytics the services collect about Web behavior.

Currently, said Leonsis, AddThis has negligible revenue and Clearspring has about $10 million in annual sales. Neither is currently profitable.

Nonetheless, Radfar said, “AddThis is the biggest small thing on the Web,” referring to its tiny icon that expands to offer users a choice of Internet sharing services and updating tools to a variety of social networks.

And indeed, AddThis icons are widespread across the Web, seen mostly at the bottom of content items on big sites like Time.com and MySpace.

While some question whether a big business can be created through such a far-flung network, Leonsis–one of the early execs at AOL in its glory days–said it was how the Web is evolving.

“If you said to me 10 years ago that you were going to be successful by sending people away from your site, I would have said you were crazy,” said Leonsis. “But that is what the Web is about now, and having a central network that can track this is important for advertisers.”

Well, we’ll see about that, but Clearspring certainly has a lot of money to try.

The company has received more than $35 million in funding since it was founded in 2004. Investors include former AOL head Steve Case, as well as the venture firm New Enterprise Associates.

Clearspring has about 100 employees.