Latest online ad frontier pushes onto social networks
Simple to build and email or embed, Web site widgets and gadgets are confounding developers and popular and obscure businesses alike about what will attract big audiences and big ad dollars.
“Big brands don’t have any advantage over Joe Shmoe. Widgets are experiencing organic growth but we’re not sure what is driving it exactly,” said Pam Webber, vice president of marketing for Widgetbox of San Francisco (DEMO 06), a platform for making, displaying, and distributing widgets, snippets of code created to play video and audio, display photo slide shows, run animations, and display text. Widgets can embed ads or be standalone ads.
While the value of a lot of widgets for users is as diversion, their value to online advertisers is their (hoped for) viral life.
When Vincent McCurley’s wife was pregnant with their first child, he used Widgetbox’s developer tools to make a widget that counts down from conception to birth. He posted his Baby Ticker on Widgetbox’s gallery last January. Today with more than 206,000 subscribers, Baby Ticker is the third most wanted widget of the 40,000 in Widgetbox’s gallery. Baby Ticker’s popularity spurred McCurley to build a pregnancy gift online business call Babystrology.
Meanwhile, big brands – Google, The Gap, YouTube, NBC, PayPal, CBS, Apple’s iTunes, CNN, and TMZ to name a few – don’t even come close to the popularity of Baby Ticker or Widgetbox’s kingpin – the Super Mario Brothers’ widget.
Widgets are one more item to the list of monetizing problems online advertisers face along with profiting from social networking Web applications and reversing the downward trend on click-through ads on Google and Yahoo!. Even when they are converted to Facebook applications, only a few widgets rocket, many fizzle.
“People assume virility. Build it and they will come is a big misconception,” said Webber, whose Widgetbox site attracts 30 million viewers a month. Widgets wallflowers usually aren’t true to the publisher’s target market and lack personalization and interactivity, she said.
What widgets are worth is being debated online on the Web Analytics Association’s new Wiki. Adding its validation, comScore, Inc. the popular Web-use measurement company, plans on making its widget usage data report more comprehensive.
Meanwhile widgets are showing up on blogs and social networking sites especially those popular with people 30 and younger - Friendster, Facebook, Bebo, Alexa, and MySpace. The prospect of reaching millions of people (and wallets) on public and white-label social networking sites has spawned a widget ecosystem with platforms like Widgetbox and Clearspring, tool makers Sprout (DEMO 08), Gigya, and Dapper, tens of thousands of independent widget programmers, studios like Slide.com and Lab Pixies and ad placement agencies like Widgetbucks and Rock You.
Alex Rowland, ceo of CozmoTV, a San Francisco start-up widget company, compares widget distribution to dandelion fluff - “little seeds distributed all over the Web.” CozmoTV, for example, has already deployed about 100 “widget video networks” seen by a couple of million people.
“What's great about widgets is users grab a taste of your site and take it with them and put it somewhere else. Humans are the algorithms,” said Rowland whose company is working on real algorithms to track where the video widgets land once they are grabbed from their original site, the speed at which they are spread, and how many people watch them.
It’s very early yet. Widgetbox in October mailed its first ad revenue sharing checks to "a couple of developers" whose widgets are hits and they “made a few thousand dollars,” Webber said.
However, the market isn’t waiting for Google’s proposed Open Social widget standard to be adopted. (Open Social is for Google and its partners, which means it so far excludes companies like Facebook and Yahoo!) Jupiter Research claims 26 percent of Internet users worldwide have used a widget.
“Open Social is vaporware now. It won’t roll out for months,” Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang recently told those gathered in San Francisco for a meeting of the Internet Strategy Forum. If and when it does, Owyang said, marketers won’t necessarily have cause to celebrate. “Open Social is not a silver bullet. One type of widget won’t work across all online communities because they are too different.”
