NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- If you're like me, you rarely visit Mashable.com, but you still find yourself reading Mashable stories, often several times a day. They have a way of finding you, and not just because founder Pete Cashmore has more than 2.1 million followers on Twitter. (Actually, that's the Mashable account; Mr. Cashmore himself has more than 12,000 followers for his personal account.)

By now you know his back story: He launched Mashable from his home in rural Scotland in 2005 at the age of 19. In the six years since, he has established Mashable as the dominant voice covering the once-emerging social-media space. Now that social media has infiltrated media, communications and marketing -- not to mention the majority of all of our time on the web -- Mashable has grown with it.

Mashable's secret is that it not only mastered coverage of social tools such as Facebook and Twitter, it mastered those tools themselves. Indeed, Mashable's readers are its best distributors, sharing 45,000 stories on Facebook and retweeting 60,000 links a day. At 35 million monthly page views and growing, Mashable is already the king of tech and business blogs, but Mr. Cashmore's goals are much bigger. The company is up to 30 employees, including some recently hired veteran journalists, and has offices in New York and San Francisco.

"It's always been my philosophy to give people what they want and what's useful to them," he said. "Even though we cover tech subjects, we do it without patronizing the reader by distilling them to their core and make them digestible to real people."