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.

A New Way to Create Buzz

As Web Users Post Icons on Personal Pages, Marketers Move In

By Sam Diaz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 25, 2007; D01

Washington Redskins fans don't mind shilling for their favorite team by wearing a jersey, just as some people are willing to show their allegiance for a school or radio station with a bumper sticker. Marketers are trying to harness that impulse for brands on the Web.

Slide, an online photo-sharing company in San Francisco, has been offering tools that allow users to create custom photo slide shows with images and animations for their blogs or social-networking pages. Now, the company is cutting deals with studios and video-game makers so users can decorate their free online photo viewer with official logos and characters.

It plans to add tools that allow viewers of these slide shows -- friends with similar interests -- to buy games, order movie tickets or download soundtracks directly from the slide show window. The new form of advertising appears on Web tools called widgets. When installed on a Web site, a widget looks like a picture-in-picture photo viewer, video player or news ticker. They are designed to display information in a way that keeps users on the same site.

As Internet advertising evolves beyond text, banner and pop-up ads, companies are looking for ways to home in on specific audiences -- an age group or fan base that is interested in its product or service. They're also trying to translate those ads into sales.

Widgets have become good vehicles for advertising because they've become popular over the past year. Professional football and basketball teams, Hollywood studios, and cable channels like Discovery see widgets as a way to market their brands or drive traffic to their sites. Some companies, like Slide, are adding vanity features that explicitly promote products or services within the widget. A site called Rock You, for example, promotes music by allowing users to add popular tracks to their photo slide shows.

In April, ComScore of Reston started to monitor widget traffic separately from Web traffic. In June, widgets caught the attention of more than 239 million unique visitors, up from 177 million in April, according to ComScore. Slide ranked as the most popular with 134 million visitors in June, up from 117 million in April. Rock You trailed with 101 million in June, up from 82 million in April.

Because friends, co-workers and families are already networking online, these tools act as a kind of word-of-mouth advertising, said Lisa Weinstein, Chicago-based managing director for Mindshare, a media-marketing firm. When people select the brands they want to champion, their colleagues are more likely to pay attention, she said.

"Every brand is looking to tap into the power of their own evangelists," she said "What people's friends think or say to each other is a leading channel of influence."

One recent such campaign involved Universal Pictures, which launched a widget through Freewebs that promoted the upcoming film "Mr. Bean's Holiday." Freewebs helps users build their own Web sites. Freewebs also used widgets to sponsor campaigns for Adidas, AT&T and others.

This summer, the Bebo social-networking site posted ads for the movie "Bratz" on a widget. Slide made a "Bratz" online photo frame available to Bebo members and incorporated songs from the movie's soundtrack into the slide show viewer.

"We build something that makes your site a more interesting place to be," said Slide chief executive Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal, an online payment company. "Until now, all of that [widget] traffic has been there to entertain the users. . . . Here's a way for widget makers to make money."

And marketers are looking for alternative ways of advertising online.

"They're becoming more and more savvy," said Mindshare's Weinstein. "They know what widgets are, and they're starting to understand the potential impact."

Discovery Networks is launching a Slide widget campaign around the "Shark Week" TV show and an upcoming program called "Last One Standing." It also has mini-versions of Web sites for popular shows like "Deadliest Catch" and Animal Planet's "Meerkat Manor," which users can add to their sites.

Chris Schembri, a senior vice president with Discovery, said it's too soon to gauge the success of its widget campaign but said it could shape how the cable channel thinks about future advertising campaigns.

"Learning how to work in this space is more important that reaching a bajillion people," he said. "If you took the time to post it on your page, your interest level is much higher than someone flipping through a magazine and seeing an ad."

Whatevercash.com.....How a 15-year-old's hobby became a $50,000-to-$70,000-a-month business.

Girls between the ages of 12 and 19 have an estimated $87 billion in buying power, according to market research firm TRU, and Ashley Qualls's Whateverlife.com attracts millions of them each month.

What's Free

So far, all the content: more than 2,600 social-networking page layouts that users cut and paste onto their MySpace and VampireFreaks profiles, as well as forums, advice columns, and Web-site-building tools.

What Pays

Advertising placed by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) AdSense--Ashley's first source of revenue and still responsible for 60% of total revenue--and ValueClick (NASDAQ:VCLK) Media, a smaller ad network. Rates depend on traffic and page views. Google's cut is about 40%, Ashley says.

Nabbr splits revenue generated by its desktop widget, which plays music videos on the site. Ashley passes along to her fans CDs and signed photos of artists provided by Nabbr.

Businesses such as myYearbook.com have contacted Ashley directly to advertise on her site. With no intermediary to take a cut, it's far more lucrative.

What's Next

Pitching potential direct advertisers. Plus, cell-phone wallpaper downloads for 99 cents to $1.99 apiece scheduled to launch by September.

Widgets bring traffic to social networks

There is more going on with widgets than simple syndication. According to a recent report from Quantcast, widgets are actually driving traffic to some social networking sites.
by Kristina Knight
Personal media network Slide saw traffic triple when widgets were offered. According to the data, daily unique visitors from the US grew from 312,000 to more than 1 million (a 265% increase). Social site HOTorNOT saw traffic double, increasing from 182,000 unique daily visitors to just over 350,000. Finally, widget creation and distribution site RockYou saw site traffic quadruple according to Quantcast. Unique daily visitors grew from 145,000 to more than 520,000, an increase of 228%.
It seems social networks grow more popular every week and with the creation of widgets advertisers actually have a bit more control over their ad dollars. By tracking site statistics through widgets, offering some content via widgets and allowing syndication through widbets advertisers have a clearer picture of how, when and why their content is being used. Widgets also make advertising a simpler thing for marketers.
"Niche social networks offer a tremendous opportunity for advertisers," said Konrad Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Quantcast. "If you have a product that is associated with that focus you have a ready-made audience. The trick is to find a combination of those niche audiences."

Announcing: widgetQube Google Desktop Edition

Now, you can run the award winning oneQube widget in you Google Sidebar as a Gadget. widgetQube Google Desktop Edition is available for download from:

http://www.widgetqube.com/?tab=products&widget=google

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

The Next Small Thing

Bits of code called widgets open the door to viral marketing across social networks. Silicon Valley sees them as a Web revolution in the making

Slide Show >>

There's a land grab under way in Silicon Valley. Not in real land (even in Tech Town, home sales are sagging), but on the Web. What's fueling the frenzy is something that couldn't sound more prosaic: widgets.

In the Web world, widgets are modules of software that people can drag and drop onto the personal page of their social network or onto a blog. There, widgets typically look like a little window or box, packing a bit of the functionality that you would get with a stand-alone Web site or software package. The result can be as mundane as the WeatherBug, or a YouTube clip of your favorite video of a bulldog riding a skateboard, or your wish list from online jewelry retailer Blue Nile (NILE ).

But widgets also can be storefront windows for selling products and services or digital billoards to which customized ads can be affixed. Create one that plays your favorite song and it can send visitors through to Amazon.com (AMZN ) to buy the band's album. Random House Inc. has a widget that lets you click through to buy new book releases from the company's online store. You might even share a slice of the proceeds.

The land grab comes from the sudden realization by software developers, media companies, and retailers that by widgetizing their programs, news snippets, video clips, and products, they can stake out some prime Web real estate. People are increasingly spending their time with like-minded souls at blogs, online communities, and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace (NWS ), Hi5, and Tagged. In a sense, creating widgets is like unleashing a cloud of benign viruses. They carry your storefront or video clip or ad to anyone's Web page or profile. And those who like them can share them with thousands of people. They multiply, and as they do, they alter the very geography of the Web.

That leads some technologists to conclude that these humble bits of code--or applications, as widgets are also known--could turbocharge a third phase in the Internet's development. In the first, users typed in addresses of Web sites or portals to find things. Then came search engines in the mid-1990s, which gave surfers a faster way to ferret out information and products. Widgets don't signal the death of portals or search engines, but they're giving even more power to individuals to become distributors, publishers, and arbiters of content. "We've got to push it [content] out to where they are," says CBS Interactive (CBS ) President Quincy Smith. "We can't drive everyone to CBS-dot-com-backslash-CSI-backslash. Nobody is around."

Marc Andreessen has seen one Web epoch. He co-founded Netscape Communications Corp. (TWX ), which ignited the Web revolution back in 1994 when it developed a commercial version of the Web browser. Now he's convinced something similar is happening. "I think the Internet is going through a major, major shift," says Andreessen, who is now co-founder of Ning Inc., a service that lets people create social networking sites. "Concepts are now able to spread on a million Web sites. It's super exciting because you can get huge scale very quickly. The big widgets have the potential to become the new networks."

The scramble began on May 24, when Facebook Inc. announced it would crack open its site and hand over significant economic and distribution power to widget developers. While MySpace.com had let outsiders paste applications on its site, Facebook, the No.2 social network, went a few steps further and let developers tap into its user profile database to increase a widget's usefulness. Facebook also created discrete areas on its site where developers can keep 100% of the revenue they generate from advertising and e-commerce.

Here's how it works now: Click the Flixster movie widget that you installed on your Facebook profile page, and it zaps you to a place where you can list the movies you've seen, along with your rating and review, or look at pages that show reviews and ratings from your friends, what's playing in theaters, and film trailers. And when your friend Todd posts his review of the new animated flick Ratatouille, Facebook lets you know about it on your news feed page. Click on the link, "View Todd's Reviews," and up comes his movie page. By that point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that program, and the cycle continues.

For many Web users, widgets are a form of self-expression. William Tinkler, a 23-year-old soon-to-be University of South Carolina law student, spends a couple of hours a week on Facebook. His page boasts five widgets in all, and his friends are alerted each time he puts up a new one. One shows the jackets of books he is reading, another tells friends who visit his page what movies he plans to rent from online movie store Netflix. (Next on Tinkler's list: The Science of Sleep.) He also has a world map featuring the places he has visited highlighted in blue. There's a politics meter on his site displaying where he stands on the conservative-liberal spectrum and a space where friends can convey their feelings about him with goofy gestures such as a virtual "high five." "I consider it another way of showing your personality," says Tinkler. It doesn't bother him that the movie widget includes a plug urging visitors to sign up for a free Netflix trial.

At software companies, Facebook's shift was greeted as though it were a starting pistol in a 100-yard dash. Hadi Partovi, the co-founder and president of iLike Inc., launched his development team on three weeks of 20-hour days to crank out a Facebook version of iLike's program, which lets people share their favorite musicians and songs with one another. Now, when Facebook friends say they are going to a concert, the iLike program automatically notifies you. Then it suggests other artists that your friends like. Click on a "who's going" link, and it brings up a page with names and photos of the 345 people planning to attend the show. The company also got an entirely separate area on the Facebook site on which to sell ads, albums, or concert tickets.

The results have been startling. It took iLike six months to sign up its first million users for the program that ran off the company's own Web site; iLike signed up another million in its first week on Facebook. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Seattle, had to borrow two truckloads of computer servers to handle the stampede. Now iLike is the third most popular application on the site, with more than 4 million users. And it is selling ads and taking commissions from the sale of concert tickets and new releases. "We are already making more money from Facebook than our own Web site," says Hadi's twin brother Ali, iLike's CEO.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 23, is taken aback by the response to his new platform. "We thought it would take a little longer to ramp up," he says. Wearing his shorts and sandals at Facebook headquarters in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., Zuckerberg says that more than half of Facebook's 28 million members have installed at least one application. He muses that Facebook has the potential to become a sort of operating system, helping communities add more and more complex services, much as Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT ) Windows is a platform that millions of developers write programs for. Then Zuckerberg catches himself and says that metaphor might be a bit much. "It's still early" in the game, he admits, and it's hard to tell how far the application movement can go.

Even MySpace is feeling the heat. Ever since Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NWS ) bought it in 2005, the site has been looking for ways to make money off its 70 million members. That has led to some run-ins. This spring, MySpace temporarily blocked access to one widget by Photobucket Inc. because it violated the company's prohibition against advertising on the site. Now MySpace says it's developing a pilot program to allow a handful of developers to integrate with its platform. But it won't open up to all; its executives say they're concerned about security and spam. "We want to open up to the best and most important applications," says MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. "Depending on how that goes, we'll open it up further."

Skeptics point out that widget fever bears many of the signs of previous Internet fads that generated tons more excitement than money. A few years ago, after all, geeks hyped podcasting as the next revolution, but the technology so far hasn't crossed over to the mainstream. There are already signs of overexuberance about widgets. On July 10 the venture capital firm Bay Partners drew guffaws from some quarters when it launched a multimillion-dollar fund devoted entirely to backing widgets made for Facebook pages. And the blogosphere is chattering about "app fatigue."

But major companies from media, publishing, technology, communications, entertainment, and retail are jumping on the widget bandwagon. Reebok International Ltd. recently created a marketing widget called "Shoe Fight," which lets you design a sneaker and put it on your Web site, while IBM (IBM ) is plugging widgets into its software, including one that lets employees turn their unread e-mails into an audio file they can listen to on the way home from work.

Google Inc. (GOOG ), the most powerful force on the Web today, is taking widgets seriously. In June, it unveiled a program to attract widget makers with $5,000 grants or $100,000 seed investments. Google is also testing Gadget Ads, which lets merchants convert their static display ads into a sort of widget by adding videos, animation, and real-time news or marketing data to them. At WidgetCon 2007, a daylong conference that brought together more than 150 marketers and technologists in New York on July 11, Google business product manager Christian Oestlien said the company is allocating the same amount of brainpower to developing widgets as it is to search engines. As Google sees it, widgets allow people to personalize their Web experience--and in the process produce more effective advertising. "I actually see gadgets themselves as a new form of advertising," says Marissa Mayer, Google's vice-president for search products and user experience.

Values of some top-tier widget makers have already been jacked up as venture capitalists and big Web players throw money their way. On May 30, Fox Interactive Media (NWS ), the parent of MySpace, paid a reported $300 million for Photobucket, which makes a photo-sharing widget, and bought Flektor, which makes a video-editing widget, for a reported $20 million. Financiers and entrepreneurs estimate there may be dozens of widget companies in Silicon Valley right now commanding valuations north of $100 million. "Widgets are a fundamentally important idea," says Vinod Khosla, one of the Valley's most respected venture capitalists, who has invested in two widget makers, Slide and iLike. "I believe it has the potential to create big billion-dollar winners."

Earlier this year, the National Basketball Assn. learned how explosive these little doodads can be. The NBA created hundreds of trading card-like widgets. The card displays a picture of your favorite player along with their updated statistics and links to news stories and videos about them, saving you a trip to NBA.com. Today, the NBA's widgets have generated more than 100 million views from 175,000 locations. "We see it as taking little pieces of NBA.com and scattering them to the wind and using them to bring people back," says Steve Grimes, vice-president of NBA Interactive.

If widgets really take off, they could upset some big apple carts. They undermine performance measures that the ad industry has tried so hard to establish for measuring Web activity, such as page views and time spent on a site. In a world where a Web site can be splintered into a hundred little pieces, widgets reshape the definition of a Web page and an audience. They also could accelerate a move away from big Web portals.

The e-commerce implications are potentially huge. Instead of simply building a destination site where people come to shop, sellers can use widgets to bring the store to the buyers. Amazon and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) have toolbar widgets that enable surfers to search their Web stores while staying on their social network or other personal page. In May the e-commerce market research firm Terapeak built an eBay (EBAY ) shopping widget that lets buyers search for items and shop from Facebook. Says eBay CEO Meg Whitman: "EBay will always be a destination site, but we will also do distributed commerce."

Widgets also can turn any blog or Web site, no matter how small, into an ad platform. Tumri, an online advertising startup, has developed widget storefronts for Wal-Mart (WMT ), online shoe store Zappos.com, Macy's (M ), and Sears (SHLD ). Any little guy with a Web page can sign up for the Tumri widget stores and pick which product categories to advertise or sell on their site. A fashion blogger, for example, may opt to sell high-end handbags from Macy's. So long as the merchant doesn't object to its goods appearing there, the publisher plunks the widget onto his site. Tumri often splits the revenue it receives for each click, 50/50, with the Web site generating the clicks and ad impressions.

This is all heady stuff. Think what happens when social networks go truly mobile. Widgets, with their bite-size appeal, are ready-made for devices such as the new Apple (AAPL ) iPhone. Every so often the creative chaos of the Valley coalesces, preparing the way for sustained profitability around a new business model. The symbiotic relationship of widgets and the social Web might--with a big emphasis on might--mark one of those moments.

Widget Industry Struts Its Stuff At 1st WidgetCon

by Gavin O'Malley, Thursday, Jul 12, 2007 6:00 AM ET
AS OPT-IN DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS POPULAR among young consumers, widgets are on the rise, according to the analysts and agency types who gathered Wednesday in New York for the first WidgetCon.
"This space is just showing some incredible month-over-month growth," said Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president, comScore. "If I were a widget maker, I'd be touting the young demographic that widgets are reaching."
In North America, more than 81 million consumers--or a full 40.3% of all online consumers--were exposed to Web widgets in April, according to a widget tracking service recently launched by comScore. For now, its Widget Metrix service only tracks widgets--mainly photo and video-streaming players--that can be embedded on Web pages like blogs and social networking pages, rather than desktop widgets. (Notably, it is not tracking YouTube's video players.)
"Widgets are about establishing a relationship with the consumer, and bringing the Web directly to them," explained Hooman Radfar, founder of widget maker/syndicator Clearspring Technologies.
Using Clearspring, Radfar claimed to have increased viewership to a major media property by 50% in six months. (The NBA and Universal Pictures have been Clearspring clients since November, and the company struck a deal with NBC Universal to carry the network's content last month.)
What's more, widgets are on the cusp of a major boost in adoption, according to Ed Anuff, co-founder and CEO of Widgetbox, a widget syndicator that just completed a major distribution deal with Forbes.com. The boom is being driven by what he estimates are some 100 million middle-aged consumers just now discovering the utility of widgets on their home pages.
"Home pages will be the next big shoe to drop," Anuff said.
Also on hand Wednesday was Eyal Gever, co-founder and CEO of technology startup Gizmoz, which just launched a major promotional deal with MTV and Taco Bell (part of Yum Brands!).
Gizmoz lets users upload personal photos to its service, which are then turned into Jib-Jab like avatars that can be distributed throughout the Web via widgets. MTV is using the technology to promote the upcoming MTV Music Awards on Sept. 9.
Demonstrating other uses for Gizmoz technology, Gever showed an action movie clip in which the star character's face was replaced with his personalized avatar's face--the marketing implications of which were obvious. It was, he said, "the mother of all mash-ups."
Something for any widget maker to consider is its relationship with the major platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and iGoogle. That's because these sites presently have a monopoly on the personal pages within which consumers embed widgets. The platforms can therefore dictate the terms of relationships with particular widget makers.
But, while WidgetBox's Anuff acknowledged the major platforms' strategic edge, he said there is room for compromise. "They've indicated that they are willing to work with us," Anuff said.

Google Trying to Goose Widget Ecosystem

Heather Green

This is interesting, via John Battelle. Google has created a new pilot program offering dough to folks who build popular gagdets, Google's name for widgets. Gadgets are Google's fastest growing products, according to a recent Washington Post story. Google is offering grants and seed investments, in which case it will take a stake in the venture making the gadget.
No surprise, right? Of any company that gets the distributed world that is widgets, it's Google.

There seem to me to be a few ways to play the widget game. One is to be a platform where people plop down their gadgets, like Facebook has shown so beautifully. Another is to be a distributor of those gadgets (and the ads that go with them) as they are flung across the Web. Either way, there is an ability to control some part of the ad sales. What, though, about folks who simply make the gadgets or the content or services that are widgetized? That's where I am trying to figure out how much value there is.

A quick look at the most popular Google gadgets shows a very popular Wikipedia gadget, a driving directions gadget and a sticky notes widget.

09:55 AM

Young Surfers Spurn Banner Ads, Embrace 'Widgets'

By EMILY STEEL
July 2, 2007; Page B3

A study of attitudes about online advertising shows that, not surprisingly, preteens and teenagers don't like banner ads and other interruptions from marketers. But the study found that in the right circumstances kids enjoy playing with ad-related features on their personal pages in social-networking Web sites.

The study is likely to prove useful for marketers trying to reach today's generation of children. It is likely to fuel a push by digital ad agencies to get marketers to experiment with new ways to advertise on social-networking sites such as Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.

In particular, the study's findings may boost advertisers' use of "widgets," which are small, easily downloaded computer programs that allow Web pages to be more sophisticated and interactive, with, say, animated graphics, videos, photo sharing, music or live chats. Media companies are rapidly recognizing the value of offering widgets to young people to make their content available online. And advertisers are starting to sponsor widget-based content as a way of spreading their marketing message or luring people to their Web sites.

Based on responses to an online survey of more than 1,200 children ages 9 to 17 and about 1,000 parents across the country, the study found that children don't want ads posted on their social-network profiles without their permission, says Samantha Skey, executive vice president of strategic marketing at Alloy Media + Marketing. Alloy based its research on a study conducted by Bethesda, Md., market researcher Grunwald Associates LLC.

"Kids have come to view [social-network profile pages] as their yearbook page. It's their collage. It's very personal," says Ms. Skey.

Children will, however, choose to post logos or promotions from advertisers on their personal pages if marketers give them an incentive, whether it is coupons and giveaways or entertaining tools, such as games, video, and animated characters. The study found that 20% of teens added content from a marketer onto their personal Web sites in the last month.

Widgets don't give advertisers any control over the type of content they'll appear alongside. But because they give consumers control, they likely fit what kids are looking for, based on the Grunwald study's findings. "The concept [of widgets] is simple. We are not going to push something in front of your screen. We are not going to annoy you. You choose what you want to engage with," says Chris Cunningham, vice president of advertising sales at Freewebs, a Silver Spring, Md.-based company that makes widgets for advertisers.

To promote the film "The Golden Compass," scheduled to hit theaters in December, New Line Cinema is running a site that lets users create a virtual "daemon" -- an animal spirit discussed in the film -- to post to their blog or MySpace pages, to add to their instant-message profile or to share with friends. Thus far, 200,000 people have created daemons and four million people interacted with them online, according to New Line Cinema, a Time Warner company.

Widgets have "so much buzz now and every advertiser wants to do a widget," says Marc Fireman, head of digital media for Reebok, which sponsored a widget six months ago. Widgets can include a link back to the advertiser's Web site, which adds to their attractiveness for marketers.

Still, popularity of widgets doesn't always translate into sales. To promote the film "Hoot," about middle-school students who take on land developers trying to build in an area where owls live, New Line Cinema last year created a program that let people download an animated pet owl to their desktops from the movie's Web site. Web users downloaded more than a million of the critters, which walk around the desktop screen, but the film was a disappointment at the box office.

"The first thing you want to do is somehow engage a consumer. Does engagement equal conversion? Not necessarily," says Gordon Paddison, executive vice president of new media marketing at New Line. "But just as with any component of marketing, media promotion, publicity and online strategy you have to find the magic sauce."

For social-networking sites, widgets have a big downside. Because of the way widgets are used -- by consumers posting the applications wherever they want -- the social networking sites can miss out on any ad revenue even when the widgets are on the site's pages. Advertisers pay only the widget maker, usually technology firms.

Indeed, MySpace says it can block widgets from its site for "commercial endeavors except those that are specifically endorsed or approved by MySpace.com." This includes carrying ads -- as well as for other reasons such as infringing copyrights.

'Widgets' May Snag More Ads

	Photos, Other Content Aided by Web Tools Draw Big Audiences By VAUHINI VARA June 13, 2007; Page B4 New data on viewing photos, videos and music on the Web may have an impact on the way advertisers and social networking sites perceive firms that help create this content. Nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content in April made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites, according to data that Web-tracking firm comScore Inc. plans to release today. The comScore data is among the first to measure the reach of companies such as Slide Inc., RockYou Inc. and PictureTrail Inc., which create applications known as widgets that consumers can use to produce videos, photo slideshows and music playlists. These individual pieces of content can then be posted on blogs and social-networking sites such as MySpace, a unit of News Corp., and Facebook. So far, Slide and other widget makers have earned money mostly by selling ads on their own sites, but have found it difficult to generate revenue from the content created using their services and displayed on other sites. The data from comScore could begin to change that by showing advertisers how widely distributed the content is, says Max Levchin, chief executive of Slide, which lets people make Web slideshows, among other applications. To use Slide, consumers first upload photos to the Slide site. Slide turns the photos into a slideshow that can be customized with special effects. Users can then automatically place that slideshow on an outside site, such as MySpace, by clicking a few buttons or copying and pasting a piece of code. According to comScore, Slide is the top provider of widgets, seen by 117.1 million Web users in April. Content such as slideshows posted on other sites has "emerged more as a form of self-expression, but now that we have data that talk about how big the audience really is, I think that will really begin to spark the advertising," says Linda Boland Abraham, the comScore executive vice president who spearheaded the study. To put the data into perspective, 105 million people visited MySpace in April and 38.8 million visited Facebook. One big hurdle: These widget makers depend largely on MySpace and Facebook for their audience, and those two sites have so far been reluctant to let third-party companies include ads on their content in "profile" pages, where people post personal details, leave messages for friends and display photos. MySpace doesn't allow widget makers to sell items or advertise via content posted on MySpace. Closely held Facebook Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., lets widget companies run ads in certain areas of Facebook, but prevents them from embedding ads in Facebook users' profile pages. Some social-networking firms are warming to the idea of allowing third parties to advertise via content on their sites. Bebo Inc., a San Francisco-based social-networking company that has many users in England, plans to start including ads with widgets displayed on profile pages and elsewhere. Write to Vauhini Vara at vauhini.vara@wsj.com

Reign of the Widget.... feeds feeds feeds

Reign of the Widget

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing - June 08, 2007

I played around with PopShops.com, a relatively new service for affiliate marketers and anybody else who wants to monetize their website or blog. PopShops.com was founded by Jessie Jones.

Overview
PopShops is a tool that offers easy to generate mini shops and widgets for your site, feed or blog. PopShop lists over 800 merchants with over eight million products across the three leading affiliate networks CJ, LinkShare and ShareASale (more will follow). It also supports some in-house programs.

Note on the side: Kudos to Dan Harms and his development team. I know how hard it is to kick around a couple million products from several hundred data feeds. It is blazing fast.

The interface is easy to use and true Web 2.0 style, using the prototype framework.

The available output options range from JavaScript snippets, classic ASP and PHP code, XML, RSS, TypePad or Blogger widget and more. The basic version is free and does not use "click sharing" or “fourth Click”, like GoldenCan or DataFeedFile, who offer similar services. This means that your affiliate links are used for every click by users on your site on any of the advertised products in the widget.

Paid versions (monthly fee) offer additional features including white label results. Currently every account has access to the full feature set, because the service is still in beta. That will change once they are out of beta and beta-customers can decide then, if they want to upgrade to the paid version or not.

Since PopShops does not interfere with the business between the affiliate and the merchant, thus do not have the need for an affiliate relationship with every merchant they support. Merchant tools are currently under development. If you are a merchant and would like to have your feed included, contact PopShops directly, at Affiliate Summit for example or other upcoming industry events.

See also ... Synthasite
Another good example of leveraging the new technologies and possibilities for affiliate marketers is the recent alpha launch of Synthasite, a project by Vinny Lingham’s Incubeta. The difference between the two is that PopShops.com lets you enrich your existing site with product showcase widgets, while Synthasite also allows people to create complete sites to promote selected products.

Conclusion
This is a good development for the industry in my opinion. The only thing sad about it is the fact that smart affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs are now doing the job that was supposed to be the job of affiliate networks. How much more wake-up calls are needed to them realize that the train is in motion, without them.

CJ's introduction of Webservices last September at CJU was a step into the right direction, but since the announcement did not much happen there. CJ listen, you got tons of feedback and suggestions already at CJU. None of it did seem to have made it into the services yet. Why did you stop?