Widgets Are Made for Marketing, So Why Aren't More Advertisers Using Them?

Bob Garfield Examines a Tool That Is Cheap, Easy and a Great Expression of the Post-Advertising Age

By Bob Garfield

Published: December 01, 2008

Some guy lives in Albuquerque, which is great, because it is sunny and really convenient to Vista Encantada and Hoffmantown. But he has relatives in Denver, a limited budget, a lot of outstanding family obligations and a seven-hour, 450-mile gulf between them. Then, one hot and dry Thursday, he's sitting at a computer, and it goes ... "DING!"

An icon on his desktop has some breaking news: a special Albuquerque-Denver fare on Southwest Airlines for $49 each way. It sends him that alert because he's asked for it, by downloading the Southwest "Ding" widget. Most of the time it just sits there, apparently idle, a tiny Southwest logo on a tiny Southwest tail section reminding him, at some extremely low level of consciousness, that Southwest exists.

BACKCOUNTRY.COM

Widget: Steep and Cheap How It Works: Advises users of special deals -- mainly loss leaders -- that draw them into the online shopping experience. Agency: In-house

But then it dings, and then he clicks, and, because Uncle Ramon and Aunt Ruth Ellen simply must be dealt with, he books.

"After the first year, we hit the 2 million mark for downloads," says Paul Sacco, senior manager for online strategy and development at Southwest Airlines. "And it's still performing." In the third quarter of 2008, Ding generated 10 million clicks.

Wanna get away ... from the Old Model? Look no further than widgets, the mini software applications downloadable to browsers, desktops, social-networking pages, home pages and mobile phones. The widget may not be the holy grail, but it's arguably pretty damn grail-ish -- maybe the highest expression so far of online marketing in the Post-Advertising Age. And though it is very much on the cutting edge of Web 2.0, it is based on the hoariest of principles. In fact, to be properly visionary on this subject, you must begin by looking way back to the future.

For the past half-century (and for about five more minutes) TV advertising has been at the apex of marketing communications. Then, in no particular order, newspapers, magazines, radio, out of home, direct mail, point of purchase, collateral (brochures, for example) and -- in the murky, mucky darkness at the very bottom of the deepest abyss of marketing prestige -- advertising specialties.

For example, a ballpoint pen emblazoned with your insurance agent's logo. Or a wall calendar, fridge magnet, coffee mug, yardstick, foam beer-can sleeve, ashtray, key fob, emery board, pocket diary -- any cheap giveaway item meant to remind the consumer of you every single time she measures fabric or swigs a Pabst or files her nails.

Not that the 30-second spot represents high culture, exactly, but it's hard for mere words to convey how déclassé the advertising-specialty niche is. Still, I'll try: What funnel cakes are to cuisine, free fly swatters are to marketing. In a digital world, advertising specialties are as analog as you can possibly get.

Until they go digital. Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World. These compact, portable little software apps -- from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators -- are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful. At a minimum, they carry an ad message wherever they go.

That's at a minimum. At a maximum, the widget is something like the magical connection between marketers and consumers, not only replacing the one-way messaging long dominated by media advertising but vastly outperforming it. Because online the link is literal and direct, and along its path, data of behavior, preference and intention are left at every step. Oh, and your target consumers actually go out searching for your branded gimcrack. Oh, and they display it within easy reach. Oh, and they pass copies along to their friends and associates. Oh, and because they've been turned on by a friend, they are hospitable and receptive recipients. And, oh, in case this didn't quite register the first time I mentioned it, the barriers to entry are preposterously low. "The money is a joke," says Hillel Cooperman, ex-Microsoft big shot and founder of small Seattle software-development shop Jackson Fish Market. "It's a rounding error in the marketing business."

Ditto that, says Michael Lazerow, CEO of branded-application house Buddy Media, New York, especially when it comes to the cost of advertising (or, as he calls it, "app-vertising") the widget itself. "It is so cheap. This is the steal of the century."

That's because 500 million social-network users, each generating 1,200 page views per month, represent 600 billion monthly opportunities for an ad impression. Hence, almost everything is a remnant, and "you can buy inventory for basically nothing," he says.

Of course, that invites online marketers to embrace another throwback concept: an endless fusillade of mass messaging with no distinct target -- which is pretty much what digital marketing was supposed to be the solution for, wasn't it? But more on the economics of widgetry to follow. For the moment, let's look at some examples that demonstrate why, at least for the time being, it represents the very apotheosis of digital marketing. As my pal Jessica Greenwood of London's Contagious magazine sums up, the widget's value is "like a basic unit of utility. The marketing becomes part of the product."

• None more so than Miles, a 3-D desktop avatar that looks like a refugee from "Teletubbies" but resides on your desktop to encourage (i.e., nag) you to run, and keeps track of your progress via the astonishing Nike Plus technology. He also keeps you apprised of local weather, running events, promotions. And he organizes your RSS feeds, so you can easily download to your iPod. From Tribal DDB.
• UPS Widget. This guy looks like Miles' tan cousin. He allows you to schedule and track shipments worldwide with a click or two. If you are any sort of frequent shipper, why wouldn't you install him on your desktop? From McCann, London, and Skinkers.
• CokeTags is a Facebook app that displays your favorite links, allowing you to itemize your online self -- and keep track of who is following the trail of self you blaze. From the Advance Guard and Linkstorm.
• Steep and Cheap is an alert mechanism from the Backcountry.com catalog that advises users of special deals -- mainly loss leaders -- that draw them into the online-shopping experience. It's essentially like the Southwest Ding and works because the audience is as much a social network of the outdoorsy as a list of gear customers. In-house.
• InStyle's Hollywood Hair Makeover allows users to lift the coiffures of Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz, et al. and superimpose them on their own photos -- for fun and/or to show a stylist. A superficiality bull's-eye! From Buddy Media.
• So you're in Singapore, old enough to drink in bars and young enough for that to be a lifestyle. Download Johnnie Walker's Jennie widget, and there is a totally cute avatar that guides you to the coolest saloon events and then, if you're half in the bag, safely home. From OgilvyOne.

Utility plus brand
Kind of hard to imagine users installing and using these ingenious apps and not appreciating the sponsor every single time -- a concept that for, say, a banner ad is even more unimaginable. As high-tech entrepreneur and former digital-marketing analyst Peter Kim puts it, "When you can combine utility with the purpose of your brand, that's the opposite of why people hate marketing. Instead of fooling them with the old brand-marketing song and dance, it's not a promise; it's a reality: 'This is what the traffic is like.

NIKE

Widget: Miles, a desktop avatar How It Works: Encourages you to run; keeps track of your progress via Nike Plus technology. He also keeps you apprised of local weather, running events and promotions. Agency: Tribal DDB

This is what the weather is. This is what the stock market is right now.'"

Yeah, I'm grateful to John's Hardware when I kill insects dead, dead, dead with my free fly swatter, and I'm grateful to Johnnie Walker when it helps me find the best Singapore bar and my stumbling way back to my bed, bed, bed. That's the kind of dynamic that gets folks excited, folks such as Newsweek and GigaOm's Om Malik, who each declared 2007 "the year of the widget." And why? Because the marketer essentially gets to set up shop where you live, work and play.

"Inside the destination and the context people are already engaged in," says Niall Kennedy, founder of consultancy Hat Trick Media and host a month ago of the third-annual Widget Summit in San Francisco. "I liken this to a small Cincinnati retailer setting up shop in all the cities of the world instead of waiting for people to come to visit Cincinnati."

Yet in 2008 the entire segment will amount to something like $100 million. That's not nothing, but even in the midst of economic implosion, it's a sum even an endangered species such as NBC Universal can shake out of the sofa cushions -- which drives software developer Hillel Cooperman right up the wall. As he ventures out to AdTech and other prominent forums about marketing's future, he is confounded by his inability to capture advertisers' attention. Even as they bemoan the continuing collapse of traditional media and worry aloud about where to spend their money, he says, it's as if he's invisible. "And I'm jumping up and down. 'Hellooooo! Over here!'" he says, the frustration ringing in his voice. "All the stars are aligning. Everybody around me says, 'You're in the right place at the right time.' Yet it's still like pulling teeth."

Hmm. Magical connection. Pulling teeth. Those two images are hard to reconcile, but let's do try. There are plenty of reasons marketers have been slow to exploit the possibilities -- and why, no matter how grail-ish it can be, the widget's place in even a fully digital marketing economy may have a relatively low upper limit.

"The whole concept of a widget is just misstated or overblown," says Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning for Mediassociates, a media-planning firm. "It's not the channel; it's what you do with it that's important."

Kunz actually likes widgets a great deal; he's just queasy to hear them oversold, given what he says are their inherent limitations -- not the least of which is the difference between engaging with a piece of software and engaging with the sponsoring brand. "There's a lot of hyperbole out there about engagement," he says.

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

Widget: Ding How It Works: Park it on your desktop, tell Southwest Airlines the prices and destinations you're looking for and it will update you on the latest deals from Southwest. Agency: GSD&M

For instance, if Schick Quattro sponsors a widget that lets a guy embed his face on the hunky body engaged in a pillow fight with two barely legal teens -- and it has -- does this carry over to razor purchases? "Does throwing pillows at each other," Kunz asks, rhetorically we suppose, "really influence anyone?"

Even if the answer is yes, there are plenty of other issues to consider.

• Nonstandardization. There are lots of incompatible platforms: desktop, iGoogle, mobile, Facebook, MySpace, etc. Pending software-code universality, you must create a half-dozen or more versions of every widget.
• Dubious relevance to low-interest categories. What makes perfect sense for Johnnie Walker and Nike may not necessarily apply to Charmin.
• Cost. While, as Cooperman correctly observes, the cost of creating a widget is enticingly small, and the cost of distributing one is low compared with media advertising, the price tag is also typically open-ended. Marketers can be socked with fees up to $5 every time some Courtney or Madison embeds a widget on her MySpace page. So if you get lucky, you could also get unlucky. "Open-ended" is hard to budget for.
• Scale. There is only so much space on a desktop or a Facebook page or a mobile-phone screen. As Kunz observes, "Sure, you can give them utility, but there are only so many slots for that utility. In my world, there may be 100 things that I use a computer for. So conceivably you can create a widget for each one of those things, but you've limited the inventory." That means the vast majority of marketers are shut out the vast majority of the time.

Then there is the Great Widgetry Schism, a fundamental philosophical difference among users and developers as to what the technology is best suited for. In commissioning a widget, do you wish to be all the rage with those notoriously fickle Courtneys, who create viral sensations that spread far and wide but quickly peter out? Or do you shoot for endurance, residing on home pages and desktops perhaps in perpetuity? The bias among widget shops seems to be entertainment over utility, essentially using widgets much like ads: to briefly get users attention and then start over when that attention wanes.

"It's a campaign model," says Liza Hausman, VP-marketing for Gigya, the largest widget-distribution agency. "Advertisers are still going to have to move the needle in a particular time frame. There are people who are looking at widgets as customer relations management or long-term dialogues. That's not where we focus."

SCHICK QUATTRO

Widget: Trim Flixx How It Works: Upload your face onto a hunky guy's body and pillow fight with barely legal teens. We're not sure why.

Hausman says this model also conforms well with consumer behavior, especially among the habitués of MySpace, et al. There, she says, a user's page is an ever-changing expression of self, which often is expressed in the form of a showcase for the user's latest discovery. In short, says Hausman, "users like to update their pages." In addition, if you assume that utility-based widgets tend to reside on desktops, vs. social-networking pages, the utility imperative comes at the expense of virulence.

"That is a one-to-one relationship," Hausman says. "That widget is seen only by the person who put it there. Those widgets help you get through the day: news, weather, info," compared with social-network-page widgets that reside "where people are putting a public face on their world. And the widget there has a 1-to-many, many exposure."

That argument would seem to be backed up by data. A study by online-market-research firm Marketing Evolution found that return on investment from widgets increases in approximately direct proportion to virulence. The study, of campaigns from Adidas and video-game publisher Electronic Arts within MySpace, found that 70% of the ROI was attributable to consumer-to-consumer proliferation. The consulting firm calls this the "momentum effect," and clearly the momentum is a function of the kind of sharing that, say, the Southwest Ding doesn't much enjoy.

"I have no vested interest," says Marketing Evolution CEO Rex Briggs. "But I do tend to lean that way, mainly because we know there are decay curves to advertising. Keeping it novel and fresh generates a larger response. Part of it is the ability and desire to pass along what you're saying. Something new makes it newsworthy, worthy of passing it along to others, and there's value to that."

On the other hand, companies such as Gigya absolutely do have a vested interest and a structural bias against the enduring-utility model: Duration militates against repeat business. If a client successfully lands a widget on a zillion desktops or social-networking pages, and it stays there, the client has far less incentive to commission subsequent efforts, which, obviously, is bad news for the software designers and distributors. Furthermore, the problem with entertainment widgets such as games is the same one that afflicts any form of viral marketing: Virulence is hard to achieve. No matter how many Courtneys are out there, it's really hard to be the Next Big Thing that, however briefly, captures their imaginations. As Cooperman puts it, "Games are just like music and movies and books. It's a hit-driven business. I think it's fair to say nobody knows how to make a hit in any of those industries."

JOHNNIE WALKER

Widget: Jennie, a cute avatar How It Works:If you're in a strange land and looking for a drink, Jennie will guide you to the bar and back to your hotel. Agency: OgilvyOne

Whichever side of the schism you embrace, widgets offer advantages that hardly any other marketing tool can match. Chief among them: portability. Can't get people to visit your website? Once they visit, you can't lure them back? Try the amazing new Website-in-a-Can! It's compact! You can store it on your desktop, your Bebo page . . . or you can fold it up and put it in your toolbar! Fun time, party time, anytime!

And it really, really works! Logs data like a website, enables direct commerce like a website and becomes a destination like a website, only without the user having to leave the virtual house. She merely goes to the cupboard and opens up a can. For free, of course. Because Website-in-a-Can is so cheap to produce, folks can just give it away.

Buddy Media, one of the biggest creators of branded apps, fills two floors of a slightly skeezy office building on Broadway just above Columbus Circle. It used to be a Fred Astaire Dance Studio, with a ground-level Indian restaurant and water seeping down the bare-brick walls after every rain. Now it's a code factory, where workers load raw zeroes and ones into their Macs and forge software parts -- parts that are in turn assembled in various combinations to form custom applications. Using that small inventory of a few hundred in-stock parts, Buddy Media can turn out widgets fast and cheap.

"If you're going to do a 728-by-90 banner ad," says CEO Lazerow, "you might as well do an app. Because it's going to take the same amount of time and cost." What he doesn't advise is buying for reach and frequency. His buzz term is "reach and engagement," the idea of cultivating a few people instead of pestering a lot more. "Instead of reaching 80 million people, let's reach a million in your target and spend 10 minutes with them." Buddy Media has no difficulty establishing the engagement part. Its hairdo widget for InStyle magazine had more than 300,000 installs, 185,000 in the first six weeks. The average time spent on each visit was seven minutes -- three hairstyles' worth -- and nearly half of the users returned to it more than 25 times. "They basically cost less than traditional banners, and you get 75 times greater time spent than with regular banners and five times more time spent than with TV ads."

One believer among his clients is Keith S. Levy, VP-marketing for Anheuser-Busch, which created a Bud Light Dude Test widget to leverage [Note to readers: I have just used the word "leverage" as a verb. This will never happen again.] a Bud Light ad called "Dude."

"The multiplier effect of the web is extremely powerful," Levy says. Though the 300,000 downloads are laughable compared with a TV buy, "you're really getting a relationship with the consumer." Another widget, created just for the lucky winners of the Bud Light Party Cruise promotion, for instance, established an ongoing community of 4,000-some evangelists such as rowyco, who (according to his MySpace page) is a 24-year-old Arizonan whose nickname is an obscene acronym, whose slogan is "Hardcore for Life," who likes country and metal and tricked-out motorcycles, and who is working on a business degree at Paradise Valley Community College. His friends are Judith, Diana, Courtney (!), Crazy Christene, Justin, The Rouch and -- right at the top of the list -- Bud Light Party Cruise.

Compare this effort, for instance, with Bud TV, which at a cost of $15 million for the first two years alone, attempted to create a content destination more or less paralleling the tube. What Anheuser-Busch earned for its trouble was a squizzillion views of the hilarious commercial "Swear Jar," the enduring enmity of many state attorneys general, and zero MySpace friends. One day in late November, Bud TV's global web ranking, according to the online-analytics site Alexa, was 26,253,061. To put that in perspective, moisttowelettemuseum.com was ranked 5,681,20947. As they say over at A-B, lessons were learned. Though he won't characterize Bud TV as a boondoggle, when pressed to look at the relative efficiency of Bud TV and pocket-change widgetry, Levy offers, "Did we have to build a stationary network where people have to go and get stuff? No."

Of course, engagement -- and even community -- cannot be directly correlated to sales. But, excuse me, apart from direct-response advertising, what can? As for the other outstanding issues casting suspicion on the sustainability of widgetry, let's take one more look:

• Platform incompatibility. While some functionality is sacrificed, something close to universal code is not far off. Lazerow says by the spring, his apps will be, with a minimum of tweaking, one size fits all.
• What works for a sexy brand might not work for Charmin. Upon further reflection, why not? Given about two seconds thought, I came up with about 10 toilet-paper-relevant ideas in varying degrees of offensiveness, from SoftCam (rotating video of a basket of kittens, baby butts, ducklings, etc.) to a Full-of-Shit-o-Meter (feeding news quotes from celebs, athletes and pols that are transparently disingenuous or worse).
• Cost. Yes, $5 an install can add up, but many vendors charge much less. More to the point, though, who says that the calendar is the right allocation tool for marketing expenditures? As long as we're reinventing commerce, should we not consider the possibility that marketing programs will be financed for as long as they perform, without arbitrary campaign boundaries? "I guess I can't understand the marketers' narrow-minded definition of the controlled calendar, because that's not how consumers' minds work," says Briggs. "It's like Coca-Cola saying, 'All those people with the Coke memorabilia from the '50s, I want it out of their house, because that's not the Coke message today.'"
• Shelf space. Even if you accept that there is a finite amount of real estate on the world's 500 million social-networking pages, the universe is expanding by the second. "Saturate the market?" Lazerow says. "We're not even close. I can't see a world in which we're going to saturate this market."

Audience migration
Oh, and one final thing. If you are a marketer who's spent the past decade investing in a robust website to attract customers and prospects, and you're therefore disinclined to cannibalize your traffic by giving away Website-in-a-Can, don't get too smug. Your audience is making that decision for you.

INSTYLE

Widget: Hollywood Hair Makeover How It Works: Steal the hottest hairstyles from the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz and plop them on your own head. Agency: Buddy Media

In the past three months, according to Alexa, Apple.com's page views per user are down 9%; Comcast.net is down 1%; Dell.com, down 22%; AT&T.com, down 18%; Xbox.com, down 9% and so on as corporate e-bastions begin to experience the same audience fragmentation that is killing old media. "As popular as your site may be," says Kennedy, the reality is that people are actually visiting Yahoo, MySpace, Google and Facebook thousands of times more than they're visiting you."

Tony Zito of MediaForge, which handles Steep and Cheap, calls this "the slow death of the destination website." Consider the source -- the man sells widgets -- but even if he's hyperventilating, the trends are a bit ominous.

If Mohammed has indeed cut back on his visits to the mountain, it may be time for the mountain to go to Mohammed.

After all -- Ding! -- the fares are pretty low.

Widget marketing 101

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1422253646/bctid1424673566

Building a Brand with Widgets

The customizable bits of software on Facebook and other social networking sites are the latest trend in viral marketing. But are widgets here to stay?

by Rachael King

The cards were stacked against A&E Television Network as it tried to generate positive buzz about its new series, Parking Wars. For one, it's a reality show about meter readers. Two, the show doesn't feature celebrities. "We thought if we could find a clever way of increasing consumer interaction with the concept behind the show that we would increase curiosity in the show itself," says Lori Peterzell, A&E's vice-president for consumer marketing.

So A&E hired area/code, a multimedia game developer, to build an online game based on Parking Wars. Played on the social network Facebook, the game has users park virtual cars on friends' profile pages, or "streets," while slapping tickets on cars parked on their own page and avoiding tickets themselves.

Grand Theft Auto it's not. What makes Parking Wars unique is how it's distributed. The game is passed from one person to the next by way of widgets, small bundles of software that users can download, customize, and forward to a single pal or an entire contact list with the click of a mouse. Widgets like Parking Wars, which are designed for a specific social networking site, are typically referred to as applications. Since its Dec. 17 introduction, Parking Wars has attracted more than 198,000 unique users, many of them repeat players, and generated more than 45 million page views.

Raising Brand Awareness

"It's surpassing our expectations," Peterzell says. A growing number of companies hope they'll be wowed by widgets, too. Electronic Arts (ERTS), Viacom's (VIA) Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Gap (GPS), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Hallmark, and Blockbuster (BBI) are among the businesses hoping to spread a marketing message or raise brand awareness through these modules of content used by millions of social network users to customize profiles or communicate with friends.

Interest in widgets is rising as marketers become disaffected by other methods of online advertising, especially on social networks. Google (GOOG) executives said in January they're not generating as much revenue as expected (BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/08) from placing ads on News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace.

Some marketers say widgets may do a better job engaging users than, say, so-called banner ads emblazoned across the sides of social network profiles. "Content and functionality are the new creativity—it's not about whether you have a whiz-bang rich media banner running," says Andy Bateman, CEO of brand consultancy Interbrand New York. "Are you doing something that's actually helpful and useful to people?"

Some Facebook Campaigns Have Fizzled

There's plenty of anecdotal success. Sony Pictures promoted its Resident Evil zombie flick by running a sweepstakes in conjunction with Rock You's popular Zombies application, which lets people send virtual zombies to bite their friends. Sony Pictures had hoped 10,000 people would sign up for its contest, and instead got 1 million takers, says RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda.

But there are even more examples of branded Facebook applications from household names such as Blockbuster, Hallmark, and Verizon (VZ) that have fallen flat. The market for ad-related widgets is still in its infancy, as evidenced by eMarketer projection that U.S. Web widget and application ad spending in 2008 will amount to $40 million, just 2.5% of the $1.6 billion in U.S. online social network ad spending. The verdict is out on whether widgets will become an integral part of social networking marketing and ad campaigns or whether they are, as some critics say, a passing fad.

The potential audience is vast. MySpace has some 110 million active users worldwide, and Facebook has a little more than 66 million. Yet of the nearly 17,000 applications on Facebook, only 138 had more than 1 million installations on Feb. 25, according to Adonomics, a firm that tracks Facebook statistics.

A Short Shelf Life for Many Widgets

To do well, branded widgets typically must engage users often, piggyback on existing popular applications, and be aimed at the right audience. "It's very challenging to maintain someone's interest over a long period of time," says Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. "Applications and widgets have a pretty short shelf life."

In fact, the adoption rate of many applications on social networking sites looks something like a steep bell curve, typically with rapid adoption at the outset and a quick drop when the enthusiasm ebbs. Depending on the application, that lifespan can be days, weeks, or months. The applications with the longest life tend to be those where developers constantly add new features to get users to come back.

Another recipe for success is joining forces with an already popular application. Independent widget makers Slide and RockYou have mastered the art of building applications that hook users and get passed liberally from one person to the next. One of Slide's most popular Facebook applications is SuperPoke, a communication tool that lets people do everything from send virtual hugs to throw virtual objects at friends. At one point, Samsung Electronics (SSNGY) sponsored a tool that lets users throw a picture of an HDTV at pals.

Reaching Out to a Younger Audience

Many adults may not immediately see the appeal of throwing a sheep or an HDTV at a friend. Then again, they're probably not the target demographic. RockYou, for instance, designs applications that appeal to teen girls. "Our goal is maximum reach, and teen girls are the most viral people on the planet," RockYou's Tokuda says.

In creating applications for Facebook, TripAdvisor wanted to reach a younger audience than its traditional 35-44 demographic. It has tried a mix of buying advertising on other applications and creating its own. "You can spend a lot of money buying installs if your application is not viral," says Christine Petersen, the company's senior vice-president for marketing.

Petersen would rather create her own applications and hope for organic growth. In-house application building is less expensive. It's also a better way to build a brand, she says. The efforts don't always pan out, but the stakes are sufficiently low that it can afford some flops. TripAdvisor's Cities I've Visited, a map where people can show where they've traveled, has been very successful. At its peak, Cities I've Visited was installed by 7.8 million people. It took two people about three days to build that application. Another app, a quiz called What Obnoxious Traveler Are You?, launched on Jan. 29, fared considerably worse, and has garnered only 500 installations as of Feb. 26. "It's been a dud," says Petersen.

Developers Are Lining Up to Make Widgets

Peers at other companies concur. "The great benefit of doing a Facebook application that only took three weeks to build is that it's very inexpensive and your opportunity to experiment is very high," says Neil Young, group general manager at Electronic Arts. Young says that Electronic Arts has spent less than $200,000 over several months with developer Context Optional to build and run a trivia game called Smarty Pants, a pared-down version of a Wii game by the same name that EA sells. He estimates that many independent developers charge between $15,000 and $50,000 a month to build and maintain branded applications such as Smarty Pants.

There's certainly no shortage of programmers willing to make widgets. Facebook has attracted more than 150,000 active developers since May, 2007, according to Developer Analytics, a company that tracks the Facebook developer community. One draw is that Facebook lets indie developers sell advertising on their applications and keep the profit. Yet some social networking sites, including MySpace, were initially reluctant to open pages to an influx of third-party widgets (BusinessWeek.com, 5/22/07). MySpace is now offering developers the opportunity to make money from their applications.

The same goes for social networking site Bebo, which officially opened to third-party developers on Dec. 12. Already NBA, Yahoo! (YHOO), Gap, and other brand marketers have created applications for the site. About 5,000 Bebo users have added the Gap's ModelMaker application, where they can become virtual Gap models by adding their photos and choosing outfits, a pose and a scene.

Plagued by Lack of Standard Metrics

RockYou's Tokuda says he also expects social networking sites hi5 and Orkut to give developers tools to create third-party applications within the next five weeks or so.

Still, it may be a while before widgets become an advertising and branding force to be reckoned with. Because of a lack of industry standard metrics, it's difficult to compare the relative success or failure of widgets, and just how much a widget is worth (BusinessWeek.com, 1/7/08). What's more, many users are getting turned off by advertising on social networking sites (BusinessWeek.com, 7/7/08). "I think application fatigue is real, and it will force people to look at what they're developing and how much they're spending," says TripAdvisor's Petersen.

Others wonder if advertising widgets can work at all on social networking sites. "Frankly, I'm very skeptical about the whole thing," says Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning at Media Associates, a media planning firm. Part of the problem, says Kunz, is that a person has to be receptive to advertising, and that's not the case with many people when they're surfing around social networking sites. "There's so much talk about viral marketing, but if it were really that easy to do, then everybody would be doing it."

Still, that isn't deterring A&E from going to the ad widget well. The company is considering widgets for shows besides Parking Wars, Peterzell says, adding: "We're in the middle of looking at concepts for returning series and for some other shows and titles being launched later this year."

4 widget best practices

By Nikole Brake

If you're launching a widget campaign, consider these strategic and technical factors to maximize your campaign's impact.

The intense popularity of widgets, gadgets, Facebook applications and their kin has advertisers and publishers eager to get on board. But before you invest in a widgetized advertising campaign, there are a number of strategic and technical factors to consider. There are also important guidelines to follow to ensure you get the most from your investment.

Are you ready to let go?
That's the first question to ask yourself, because consumers interact with widgets (and thus your content) outside the confines of your website. That off-site engagement may run counter to your online marketing instincts.

But by their very nature, widgets keep users interested in your message, which is likely to drive pageviews back to your site. A desktop widget is an ever-present reminder of your brand -- like the promotional mousepads you once gave away, only much more effective and minus the coffee stains.

Beyond a willingness to give consumers a long leash, you must also be ready to put some effort into keeping your widget evergreen. Refreshes should occur in real-time, or at least daily. And your content has to be interesting and relevant over an indefinite period of time. It's not a medium for lazy advertisers; however, it is a new canvas for the truly creative.

If you're ready to both liberate your content and invest some energy in your widget, it's a channel worth exploring. Once you decide to move forward, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

Serve a purpose, and serve it fresh
Widgets shouldn't simply be advertisements for your content or service. Think of them instead as a service or tool unto themselves - something that keeps users engaged with your message because it delivers value in some way. Especially when it provides real-time, practical information, consumers will refer to your widget again and again.

A classic example that meets these criteria is a branded traffic widget updated in real time. Because it's both useful and current, users may well interact with it several times each day -- during the AM and PM commutes, for example. That's at least two times per day that your brand is on your customer's mind -- a level of awareness that's hard to beat.

Stick with standards and partners you know
On the development side, adhering to IAB standards maximizes the number of potential placements for your widget. It's also wise to stay within "general" publisher restrictions for file sizes.

If you're sourcing third-party content such as RSS feeds or APIs for Mashups, work with a partner you trust absolutely. Any problems with widget security or reliability can sting your users and compromise your brand image.

The good news is that your first foray into the widget market needn't involve developing a widget from scratch. Often, you can simply repurpose popular information or features from your existing website. Innovative search features, shopping recommendation tools or special-interest news, for example, can all be widgetized by reducing file sizes, increasing interactivity and possibly adding a social or creative spin.

The point is, if consumers like information or features on your site, they may love the convenience of a widgetized version.

The distribution question
Once you've created your widget, how do you get it to fly? The first step is to find a syndication partner. Syndicators provide the "wrapper" or components necessary for your widget to be picked up on blogs, social networks, and personal pages. YourMinis from Goowy Media (now part of AOL), Clearspring Technologies and Interpolls are just three examples of established syndicators. Once you have a syndication partner, you can place your widget in popular galleries such as Yahoo's Widgets, Facebook, the Mac Dashboard or Widgetbox. Of course, be sure to showcase your widgets on your own site, and consider working with a widget ad network.

Given the popularity and the ingenuity devoted to these mini-applications, widget-based advertising will continue to grow and evolve -- enabling creative forward-thinking advertisers and publishers to build a totally new kind of customer relationship.

Why widgets are worth watching

Two top execs from Clearspring and Gigya offer a glimpse at what the future holds for widgets and how to capitalize on this rapidly growing trend.

Without question, widgets have emerged as the leading vehicles to provide new digital marketing and publishing opportunities, commonly, but not exclusively, attached to social networks. And while many marketers are eager to explore this burgeoning platform, the range of options to create, distribute and measure widget campaigns in light of a rapidly changing online media environment can seem daunting.

To help lend some insight and clarity on the state of the widget space, I spoke with Hooman Radfar, CEO and co-founder of Clearspring, and Ben Pashman, VP of business development for Gigya, for a glimpse at what the future holds for widgets.

iMedia: Are you seeing a lot of confusion in the marketplace regarding widgets, how they can be produced, utilized, measured, etc?

Radfar: This space is evolving quickly, so there is no question that there is some confusion. What is success? Is it the number of installs or engagements? What tools are available? That being said, I think people are really starting to get it as the value chain begins to emerge. Last year, the market was characterized by early adopters experimenting to understand the medium. I think this year you are going to see some serious movement from publishers and advertisers making aggressive spends against this category.

I believe that our [Clearspring] position as the original one-stop-shop widget platform and service provider for the media space has helped us gain some serious advantages. Our ability to enable widgets to be shared across social networks, start pages, blogs and the desktop, coupled with our analytics and reporting platform, provide a 360-degree solution for people who are serious about optimizing the performance of distributed content. This enables our clients to focus on what they do best -- building great brands and content.

Pashman: Yes, there is confusion. I hear questions every day such as what are best practices behind building a successful widget, how do you ensure a significant number of users actually embed and share a widget, what metrics are most important for measuring campaign effectiveness for social media or widget campaigns? Much of the confusion is coming simply from the terminology. Words such as distribution, network, platform application and even "widget" are used differently by different companies in the widget space. We can do a better job as an industry getting on the same page to clear up much of this confusion.

The problem advertisers face, however, is that they have no idea if and when users will actually see and share their widget, even if they've invested a huge amount of money to build it. The opportunity we [Gigya] offer advertisers is to buy widget installs in a specific timeframe and for a specific budget. This allows advertisers to execute on a dedicated brand widget campaign (as opposed to a sponsored widget campaign) the same way they do a traditional online ad buy, aligning it with an overarching campaign or promotion. We are platform-agnostic, so even if an advertiser has built a widget on another company's widget development platform, it is still a great candidate for running on the Gigya network to increase the number of installs to user pages.

iMedia: Can you cite some examples of how top marketers and publishers are currently using your platform? What have been the signature executions to date?

Radfar: My recent favorite was the campaign for the movie "Cloverfield." The studio leveraged our platform and services to create a first-of-a-kind viral contest. In the contest, the fan that spreads the trailer the most wins a hometown screening of "Cloverfield." This campaign leveraged our creative services to build the widget, our robust analytics engine to measure the campaign, our sharing tools to make the widget viral, and our reporting API to show users how they were doing. The exposure to the widget has been amazing.

Another example of an interesting implementation was between a publisher and advertiser. Fox Television recently created the "Futurama" widget and ran an advertising sponsorship with us via Virgin Mobile. Fox TV extends its brand to the Web 2.0 world and Virgin Mobile hits its target audience in a hard-to-reach medium.

Pashman: Gigya has produced widgets and run distribution campaigns for several big-name entertainment companies including MTV, Comedy Central and others. But we had a widget campaign launch in January for Kimberly Clarke that is unique in many ways and should get the industry buzzing. The TV-like quality of the content is the first thing you will notice (along with the dancing toilet paper). In this case, the widget is a cornerstone of the online integration with both print and broadcast.

iMedia: On the creative front, widgets appear to be the natural evolution of rich media display advertising. There are already established players in this space. How are you integrating with those platforms?

Radfar: Widgets served as rich media is clearly where things are going. We are a partner-driven company and believe that by working with leaders in the advertising and reach media space, we can make our clients more successful. As such, Clearspring has established an exclusive partnership to integrate with PointRoll to create our SnaggableAd product. With PointRoll owning nearly 70 percent market share in rich media online advertising, we think that we can create some serious value. In addition, we have also integrated with most of the leading ad networks and ad servers including DoubleClick and MediaPlex.

Pashman: Clearly rich media ad units are a natural starting point for branded widgets. We announced the first deal in the marketplace back in November with Eyewonder. Our Wildfire technology enables users to install content directly from an ad unit -- basically converting an Eyewonder ad unit into a widget. We expect to see lots more activity in the rich media space throughout the first quarter of this year.

iMedia: We're starting to see more examples of quantifying the momentum effect enabled via widget-based campaigns on social networks. What are your firm's capabilities regarding tracking interaction/engagement?

Radfar: Since creating the first viral analytics hubs for widgets in 2006, we have invested heavily in understanding widget distribution and have developed patent-pending technology in that area. We understand what the affinity distribution paths are and then visualize a topography that identifies the hubs responsible for the higher performing through-put.

Metrics standards are critical for the success of any space. As such, we are working tightly with folks in the online measurement space to standardize viral metrics like these, as adoption of metrics is crucial to the success of the ecosystem.

Pashman: Gigya is tracking approximately 2 billon widget impressions per month. We track stats like total posts and impressions -- both of which can be queried by day -- and date range as well as by unique ID. We also track viral distribution patterns so advertisers gain insight into where their ad is getting traction. Because widgets allow advertisers to interact with their audience in new ways, we also give advertisers the ability to track any interaction metrics they want. So if the widget has three videos and six MP3s, the advertiser can give us nine different tags and track the interaction of the widget and what songs/videos are most popular. There is no restriction on the amount or type of interaction metrics an advertiser can track inside the widget.

iMedia: Are marketers "getting it" for these types of analytics?

Radfar: I think so. Clearly CPM is not going to disappear right away, but there is definitely a trend toward embracing new models and metrics. We are engaged with web metrics experts at all levels. Those parties, as well as our customers, are definitely asking the right questions -- they want to understand how you could look at particular data on a page. They're interested in the fact that we're calculating time spent, grabbing all of the clicks and how to instrument their widgets to collect custom events, like unique sequences of interaction.

Keep in mind that for the advertiser, there are analytics about the widget, where it's going, what it is doing, etc. And then you have an ad tag, potentially, that's served into the middle of that widget that's capturing different metrics. And that's where I see our value, pulling in that unique widget engagement data versus the data that the ad tag will produce. In the near term, I think we're most likely going to see variations on CPC/CPA type models applied to widget-based ad buys -- a CPI (interaction) if you will -- because whatever is simplest will be the most used and marketers are comfortable with pay-for-performance metrics. But realize that the way in which companies measure, value and pay for widget campaigns is changing rapidly.

Pashman: I think the question you are asking is, "How are advertisers defining success" for these kinds of campaigns? Even in traditional campaigns, hitting CPC or impression metrics doesn't mean a campaign is successful, but experience shows that hitting certain metrics is likely to impact brand awareness, sales or other business and marketing goals. We think it's important to work closely with advertisers to define campaign success in the early stages, both to figure out how these campaigns can achieve some traditional brand goals, but more importantly how to achieve other goals -- new brand insights, identifying and getting feedback from real brand advocates.

AOL Buys Widget's Goowy Media

Staying with widgets, AOL has paid an undisclosed amount for San Diego-based Goowy Media. Founded in 2004, Goowy Media was build by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt and Jeremy Suriel and Sashi Bommakany. Goowy currently has two products in production, the Goowy Webtop and
the yourMinis Widget Platform.

The goowy webtop is a set of integrated tools for communicating and sharing, including email, contacts, calendar, file storage, integrated instant messaging, and games.

Yourminis is a personalized dashboard of widgets that let users get information and
features from across the web in one place. Users can configure Minis to see their email,
check the weather, watch Youtube videos, search the web, browse flickr photos, read
news and RSS feeds, save notes & to dos, listen to music, etc.

AOL had worked with Goowy to provide original widgets for myAOL. However, the company's
specified that Goowy would be folded into AOL's online advertising unit called Project A.

Read on... - http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001R7dU3cVOvKtEPRZ-pxl_SCx_RGUX-hlAG5tnCraI5Z9t7qVHMrDSBzTnuTM5tE-A3GmHNw_FED4UinyE4x_ymsSP0H3ePQ3o5cVWLO6UXMeo8C6DG6KNvzKmXdAIyS5nxFBRz4toDkBxNlQDZ4qJrpnW2SahcBQJqxJwbKL2ZQ0I_-RVY52xclL9YXbatvgaC76qyfpo0HQ=

KickApps Courts Programmers and Non-Programmers Alike

KickApps, a social tools provider for websites, has released KickApps Version 3.0. This version lends more functionality to advanced developers with the API developer kit announced last month.

The interface was also made more intuitive for non-programmers.

Version 3.0 includes a selection of site themes and a WYSIWYG Site Styler that lays atop websites, allowing people to make changes by sight.

Improved platform accessibility is a sign KickApps may be out for the blood of web-based Ning.

'Top Friends' Is Top Facebook App, MySpace Has Largest Widget Audience

Hierarchy is
never fully leveled

In November 2007, nearly 148 million US Internet users viewed widgets — representing 81 percent of the total audience, according to comScore's November 2007 US rankings of the top web widgets, reports MarketingCharts.

MySpace.com widgets had the widest audience, reaching more than 57 million Internet users, while Slide.com ranked second with 39.2 million viewers.

"Top Friends" by Slide was the top-ranked Facebook application during the month, with more than 6.2 million engaged viewers (18.5 percent of the Facebook audience)

comScore's Widget Metrix service now includes reporting of JavaScript objects - as well as Facebook applications, measurement of which requires that a user actively engage it and therefore different from the reporting of other widgets, which are measured in terms of views or exposures.

Top Facebook Apps

The inaugural Facebook application rankings revealed that more than 20 million Facebook visitors, or 61 percent of the site's US audience, engaged with an application in November.

Visitors between the ages of 18 and 24 were twice as likely as the average Facebook visitor to engage with applications, while those aged 25 and older were less likely than average to do so.

Ranked second after "Top Friends" on Facebook was Movies by Flixster with 5.2 million (15.4 percent) and SuperPoke! by Slide with 3.6 million (10.8 percent).

Slide contributed three of the ten most-engaged Facebook applications in November, while RockYou! contributed two.

Widget definitions: The current universe of widgets is defined by comScore as embedded Shockwave Flash objects, certain JavaScript objects, and Facebook applications. The report currently focuses on the individual widgets, and not the platforms that deliver them. Desktop widgets are not included in the reporting.

Learnings from the Widget Roundtable

January 18th, 2008 | Category: Widget Strategy

Dave McClure (who helps teach the Stanford Facebook class, and runs the Graphing Social Patterns conference), Justin Smith (of Inside Facebook), Rodney Rumford (of FaceReviews), and myself brainstormed last night trying to understand the current state and direction of the emerging widget industry.

The widget universe is vast with a lot of variation. So although the initial goals was to try to categorize the widgets into clean buckets, and we found that to be an impossible task. Widgets can often have multiple attributes, so instead we focused on attributes and characteristics, rather than groupings. We developed a couple of models, (none that are perfected) but noticed a few ways to look at the attributes:

Levels of Data Interaction
Highest | Application uses data from your social network | iLike
High | Application uses data from your preferences | Pandora
Low | Application pulls data from source | Audio stream (like a radio station)
None | Static widget, display badge | Widget links to other website

We also explored a model of self-expression/vanity/entertainment vs utility and communication. And also found that some apps have different lifecycles from simple one time users (disposable widgets) or to those that got more value over time as network usage increased.

Later, Ro Choy from RockYou came by and presented me with a very clear definition of the differences between widgets and applications. Essentially (and I have a video of him to come) widgets are limited in functionality (due to limitations in size), usually resulting in the widget creator trying to get the user to go another website, vs an application that has full functionality, is on multiple pages, and therefore the widget creator doesn’t need to lead the user off the application.

So in summary, this was one of the first cracks at trying to segment the landscape, we’ll have to have subsequent meetings to drill down even farther. I’ll be mulling this whole thing over for the next few days/weeks to try to make sense of all the learnings. It’s a much larger universe (over 13,000 widgets exist, which will likely double this year) developing a taxonomy will be challenging and fun.

I was planning to live stream the event, but had issues with my wireless, although Rodney was taping and I’m sure he’ll post it. Chances are, you’ll find it very boring and dry, as we weren’t playing to the camera, we just had it on from the other side of the room as we discussed.

Slide gets $50M on $500M Valuation

Widget dev firm Slide has secured $50 million in a new round of financing, drawn from a group that included Fidelity and T. Rowe Price. The company is now valued at $500 million.

BusinessWeek deduces that, over the long term, Slide may favor share offerings over selling to another company.

Widgets built by Slide reached 150 million users in 2007, according to comScore. The opportunities behind such reach, for a utility that can be wedded to any site, is of understandable interest to investors.

Widgets are the new ad kid on the block

Brand advertisers are turning to mini-applications with dynamic content that people can embed in their own Web pages and share with others.

Forget static banners. Online ads are evolving into mini-applications with video, games, and dynamic content that people like enough to embed in their own Web pages and share with others.

These widget ads aren't commonplace yet, but they are cropping up more and more, further blurring the line between advertising and content. For some it will come as an improvement over flashing emoticons, dancing silhouettes, and expandable text boxes that cover up the item you want to read on a page.

Many people are already using desktop widgets, which are small applications that update dynamically and offer a limited function for things like calendar, clock, weather, and news or RSS feeds. Yahoo offers them, as do Microsoft and Google, who call them "gadgets."

Then there are the thousands of widgets on Facebook, things like Slide for photo slide shows and iLike for music recommendations, which have boosted the popularity of the social-networking site.

The interactivity and viral nature of widgets make them attractive to marketers looking for new ways to expand their audience. Brand advertisers are jumping on the widget ad bandwagon at a rapid clip.

"This is an effective way for marketers to share their brand with influencers out there...It has to be compelling enough for someone to want to grab it and place it onto their page."

--Peter Kim, president of Interpolls

This week, Ford will be launching a new online ad campaign using widgets that will run on AOL sites. The widgets advertise Sync, an in-car system that lets you speak commands to use a mobile phone and digital music device. Sync is powered by Microsoft.

The Sync widget ad lets you download a free song or view a number of short humorous videos, and offers more information about the product. You can also grab the widget and embed it into other sites.

"This is an effective way for marketers to share their brand with influencers out there," said Peter Kim, president of Interpolls, which is hosting the Sync widget ads, as well as tracking their performance even as they get passed on to blogs, RSS readers, social networks, and home pages across the Web. "It has to be compelling enough for someone to want to grab it and place it onto their page," he said.

If the Sync widget ad doesn't grab you, maybe the widget ad for the Warner Brothers film August Rush will. It's got photos, a trailer of the movie, and lets you find show times for theaters near you based on your zip code.

Then there's the Interpolls widget ad for dating site eHarmony that has rotating questions about dating. If your curiosity is piqued, you'll answer the question and a pop-up window will tell you the correct answer (45 marriages each day are "fostered" through eHarmony, according to the widget ad), while offering you a sign-up form for a free personality profile.

Other widget ads let you buy tickets and make other transactions and e-mail the ads around. "These widget ads can help qualify users for clients," Kim said.

Last week, PointRoll launched what it calls SnaggableAds, which are distributed over Clearspring Technologies' Widget Ad Network. These ads can be animated cartoons, videos, and games, such as one similar to Space Invaders.

Real-time feedback
Beyond the viral distribution aspect, marketers are attracted to the tracking and reporting that Interpolls and PointRoll can offer. Interpolls, for example, offers real-time data on how many times and in what way people have interacted with a particular widget ad. It also tracks how many times the ad has been grabbed and where it's been embedded--whether it was in a specific blog, Facebook or iGoogle. The ad companies also track all interactions within the widget ads that have been grabbed.

"We're tracking all the impressions of the ads that were served," said Kim. "Then we track every single response to the question or click to any of the features, as well as any interactions on subsequent panels."

Even Google has gotten in on the act, launching a beta of Google Gadget Ads three months ago. The ads are served on Google's content network, which reaches 800 million people, said Christian Oestlien, product manager of Google Gadget Ads.

Now on News.com

TorrentSpy loses copyright case In chip business, the scales tip CNET Reviews: Dos and don'ts of games for kids Extra: Annoying automated chat bots

Nissan has embedded Google Maps with live traffic feeds into its gadget ads, auction houses are pulling in live auction information for items relevant to particular Web sites, and a consumer packaged goods company has put a recipe search engine into one of its gadget ads.

And Honda Civic partnered with pop punk band Fall Out Boy and created gadget ads in which people could submit questions to the band and receive answers, Kim said.

The gadget ads allow marketers a "more emotional response than they are used to in their traditional campaigns," he said.

"In the future, this is probably going to be the model for all advertising across media, but we're still in the early stage of the evolution of these things," said Andrew Frank, a research director at Gartner. Down the road, we'll see mobile widgets, TV widgets, widget-enabled devices like Chumby, and widget ads in games and other interactive content, he predicted.

However, it's premature to say if the ads are all that much more effective than traditional banner ads, said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president at Denuo, the media futures arm of ad firm Publicis Group. "It is very early for this hyper-distribution scenario for content, let alone the advertising component of it," he said.

One thing is certain, there will be only more "widgetization" of content and ads, particularly when the distribution is so easy. "This lets advertisers bypass media properties and communicate directly with consumers," Hanlon said.

ANNOUNCING: widgetQube 1.5 Apple dashboard RSS widget

Mac Dashboard Widget

Cutting-edge news delivery on a cutting-edge OS. Mac users will feel right at home with the Mac Dashboard version of widgetQube's friendly interface and unique features.

What's new?
widgetQube v1.5 includes Leopard compatibility, updated interface components and improved feed handling. Version checking has also been added to make updating widgetQube in the future even easier.

Web widgets: connect the missing link

By Peter Kim

A successful widget should not only be entertaining and inline with content available on a given site, it should also fulfill ad serving requirements set forth by portals and publishers.

Advertisers aggressively are seeking new ways to reach elusive demographic segments online, fueling the explosion of widget marketing.

Widgets can be published on desktops, on personal web pages and shared virally. They can also be tracked and monitored. The opportunities for marketers are virtually limitless. Web widgets stand to become the Toyota Prius of the online advertising industry, with their ability to integrate new technologies and deliver excellent mileage, all in a very resourceful and drivable machine.

However, until recently, finding ways to effectively disseminate widgets have left many scratching their heads in search of a distribution model that makes sense from a business standpoint.

It appears it might not be enough to simply take a "build it and they will come" approach.

The challenge of portal and publisher requirements
Monetizing and effectively distributing widgets has proven challenging to date, but it becomes even more challenging given the specific requirements many of today's leading web portals and publishers employ.

While these entities have demonstrated they are eager to embrace the widget phenomenon, there are certain requirements they are not willing to compromise -- and with good reason.

At the top of the list is security. Portals and publishers alike have concerns over widgets that require users to input user name and password data, since that data is sensitive and thus subject to possible hacks or liability issues. The potential of security breaches and lawsuits, regardless of the level of security in place, simply has not made the risk of accepting these types of password-protected widgets worthwhile. This, in turn, has made distributing widgets all the more challenging for providers. Unfortunately, many of today's current widget providers don't offer the level of security needed to ensure safe dissemination.

The second requirement relates to many leading portals and publishers maintaining policies that do not allow fourth-party hosting of a widget, or any other type of online content for that matter. An example of fourth-party hosting would be a standalone widget provider who is not authorized to distribute content through the portals and publishers.

A key concern is that the party hosting the widget or content is not only a reliable host but will be able to manage, host and track the widget based on portal and publisher peak traffic levels and certification test requirements. Most do not want to go through certification of new fourth parties and prefer to have everything hosted, tracked and reported by the third party serving the ad.

The third requirement relates to specifications and policies. Portals and publishers need to ensure that specifications, site requirements and policies for their property are met during each campaign, regardless of the type of content going on their site. Multiple parties involved in the process -- creating the widget, hosting, tracking and distributing the widget -- will make it challenging to ensure the widget is within site requirements.

This presents a tall order to fill for widget providers that lack the experience or history of serving content to mainstream sites and portals, be it banner ads or beyond.

Enter rich media ad serving: the missing link
The widget future appears bright for third-party organizations that are already approved to provide sites and portals with banner ads and other forms of online content.

Rich media widgets provided by established third-party providers can serve as the effective missing link. Rich media widgets are web-based widgets that, at the same time, serve as rich media ad formats that can be ad served through a certified ad platform. Because of their ad compatibility, these widgets are served, hosted, tracked and reported through a single solution.

Similar to a banner ad purchase, marketers can distribute a widget across all sites and portals on their media plan, without having to worry about site kick-backs or launch delays. The learning curve is virtually nonexistent, and, as an added bonus, the trust with publishers and portals has already been established.

The bottom line is a successful widget should not only be functional, entertaining and inline with content available on a given site, it should also fulfill the complex ad serving requirements set forth by portals and publishers.

Compliant rich media ad-serving widgets placed on a variety of leading sites and portals enable advertisers to achieve the next level of widget success -- ensuring the widget is highly visible, easy to find and simple to "grab."

Peter Kim is founder and president of Interpolls. Read full bio

RockYou Widget Revenue - $100K per Month

RockYou Revenue - $100K per Month
Derek from Widgetslab points us to an interview from Forbes.com with RockYou's Jia Shen. From the article:
Since RockYou’s founding two years ago, 90 million social networkers have downloaded its applications. For this, RockYou is making more than $100,000 a month in revenues showing ads alongside its mini-applications for brands like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), as well as by plugging other developers’ mini-apps (for a fee).
$100K per month? Gulp.
Could that be right? Even with big brands advertising plus the cost per install Facebook stuff, that's all the revenue they're seeing?
My best guess is that even though this article was published just five days ago, it's already out of date. I would imagine that RockYou's CPI revenue alone will exceed $100K in November.

MediaTrust Product ALERT: widgetQube iPhone Edition

Now, you can run the award winning oneQube widget on your iPhone. widgetQube iPhone Edition is available for download here.

widgetQube

The way the ‘always on’ generation stays informed. widgetQube is an interactive virtual desktop accessory that makes it easy to view news from favorite websites and blogs by leveraging rapidly growing widget based standards and technologies. widgetQube makes it easy to see what’s going on in the world, with up to the date news conveniently delivered right to your desktop. No searching or surfing required! widgetQube is a constant and ‘always on’ desktop companion. Its persistence will insure that you stay informed and up to the minute with news and information in our busy modern age. Best of all, widgetQube is free.

Check out our other widgets at http://www.widgetqube.com, including our Mac widget, which was picked for the Apple.com Staff Pick List for the week of May 07, 2007 and made the top 50 most downloaded widgets list for the same week on the Apple.com Widget Gallery. Our Yahoo widget was aYahoo Gallery Pick the following week and made the top 50 most downloaded widgets.

Slide.com Plans Widget Revolution

Slide.com Plans Widget Revolution
FortuneIn just a few months, Slide.com has become the most popular widget maker on the Web; its embeddable products allow users to easily post video, pictures and anything sparkles and moves to their Web sites, blogs or social networking pages. The latest Web 2.0 fad, widget use, continues to grow apace according to comScore, which says that some 220 million widgets were consumed in May alone. What's so special about embedded software apps anyway? For publishers, they make Web pages stickier. Like a Web page within a Web page, widgets allow users to customize their content. For example, an NBA fan could paste a dynamic scoreboard or game tracker on their Google or Yahoo home page. Theoretically, widgets will enable users to watch live or previously recorded games some day.Slide.com founder Max Levchin, who also co-founded eBay's PayPal, believes these apps can become money-making machines. Slide currently embeds ads around slide shows and other apps, but Levchin has far grander plans: do-it-yourself product placement. Web users may ignore banners and pop-ups, but they won't ignore ads that they choose for their Web pages. For advertisers, it's still a test, but marketers like Paramount, AT&T and Discovery Channel let users post brand images to their pages through widgets provided by Slide; the widget-maker and the app developer only get paid if someone interacts with the product placement. To be sure, it's a fascinating twist on brand marketing, but will it ever generate enough usage to be worth it to marketers? - Read the whole story...

From Garage to Cubicle: JS-Kit Closes $1.2 Million Seed Round

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III.

JS-Kit’s library of widgets make it dead simple to add interactivity to your site. They have widgets for commenting, rating, polls, top rated content, and a combination for rated comments. Each of the widgets is fully skinable by CSS and only require a couple lines of code to add. Each of the widgets use javascript and are linked to page elements by the URL of the page or a customized id property.

Over 5,000 sites have added the widgets, adding 1,000 more each month. Combined, the sites generate over 70 million impressions each month. They’ve already got some ideas of how they want to monetize that traffic. One route is dropping advertisements into the widgets. Rather than putting ads in all the widgets, they’ve decided to only put ads in the “top rated content” widget. Publishers can either keep the ads and split the revenue 50/50, or pay about $40 a month/1 million pageviews your widget gets.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is one client which has simply opted to pay. They originally added the widget to their site to save themselves unnecessary development time. We made a similar choice when adding their ratings widget to CrunchBase.

Widgets as white labeled website features is a useful concept for publishers who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Kickapps has done this somewhat with social networking. However, JS-Kit still has a bit to go in making their widgets viable for larger clients.

As easy to use as JS-Kit’s widgets are, it’s a tough proposition to ask larger businesses to hand hosting and control of their user’s data to JS-Kit. Businesses that depend the most on these features (and would therefore pay the most) may choose to spend the time to develop the feature in house and hedge against any future risk from depending on a web service.

comScore adds Widget Metrix

Online measurement company comScore will now track embedded content on webpages, known as widgets, giving full credit to the websites that are serving it.

by Helen Leggatt

Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore, couldn’t believe her eyes when presented with recent figures that had been run on widgets. According to their measurements, 178 million people worldwide have viewed at least one.

Widgets became popular with MySpace members who use them to embelish their profile pages. More recently Facebook has begun to allow developers to create widgets for their members. Other sites, such as PhotoBucket, provide widget code that can easily be embedded in blogs and social sites.

By tracking widgets comScore can now track what content people are looking at and not just the page. While site visitors may be viewing a MySpace profile, they may well be watching PhotoBucket content, via a widget, and comScore’s new Widget Metrix will now measure that widget usage.

According to comScore's analysis of the top ten Web widgets worldwide, photo-related widgets were the most popular. The top widget provider, Slide, was shown to have a worldwide reach of over 117 million unique viewers, that’s nearly 14 percent of the total world internet audience. RockYou came in second with 82 million viewers, then PictureTrail with 31 million and PhotoBucket came in fourth with 28 million viewers.

"The reach that widgets have is gong to surprise a lot of people," said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. "What advertisers are ultimately interested in is what are people looking at, not what page ... and our index showed we have 60% more 18- to 24-year-olds than average internet property."

NBC Universal Adds Widget Partner

by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, Jun 7, 2007 6:00 AM ET
NBC UNIVERSAL HAS PARTNERED WITH widget maker Clearspring Technologies to increase the spread of its content throughout the Web. Users will be able to personalize widgets--carrying NBC news, entertainment, and sports--and post them on their own blogs, social networking profiles, Web sites, and even wikis.
"Changes in the behavior of online users and innovation in technology have provided us with new opportunities to grow the reach for our content," explained Sab Kanaujia, vice president, digital product strategy and development for NBC Universal.
Initial launch widgets include popular content from "Dateline," "Hardball with Chris Matthews," "Meet the Press" and "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," as well as content from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com and iVillage.com. Available content will continue to expand, along with increased personalization options and enhanced features.
Clearspring is a promising startup attempting to usher in a new era of widget-dominated computing. Widgets are growing in popularity because their existence within a users' online experience is completely controlled by the users themselves--unlike pop-ups--and can be used to complement their social networking or blogging environment.
The Washington, DC-based Clearspring already serves a number of big clients, including CBS and the NBA. It just received a fresh round of funding from former AOL heavyweights Ted Leonsis, Steve Case and Miles Gilburne--along with Novak Biddle Venture Partners of Bethesda, MD--bringing its total financing to $7.5 million.
NBC's partnership with Clearspring comes at a time when media companies are waking up to the power of online video syndication. Leading the way in this field is rival network CBS, which recently established a broad Internet distribution platform for its programming through deals with 10 major companies, including AOL, Joost, Comcast, MSN, and Brightcove.

Killer Startups widgetQube review

3killers
+
Widgetqube.com - A Widget For RSS Feeds
posted 7 hours ago by Siri Visit http://www.widgetqube.com/ view profile
With the development of RSS feeds getting updated and clued into all the latest happenings has gotten incredibly simple. Feed aggregators and speed readers have increased the functionality of RSS. WidgetQube takes RSS and aggregation to a new level. This elegantly designed widget displays clear, legible headlines as well as a snapshot synopsis of each story, so you know what the story is about without having to click to another website. It comes with a set of preloaded RSS feeds spanning a ra... read more
0 comments tell a friend source: e-Hub category: Blogging-Widgets tags: feedreaders widgets all
Add to: my favorites / bookmarks