Wednesday, January 30, 2008

2008: The Year of the Ad Widget

Matt Hulett, CEO of Mpire CorporationHi everyone. Matt, CEO of Mpire here. I haven't contributed to this blog lately so thought I'd swing by, say hello, thank everyone for your continued support of WidgetBucks, and share a few thoughts on what I see ahead in the wild world of widgets.

First, a quick snapshot of the business. We continue to see great adoption of WidgetBucks, impressions are increasing each month, and we should reach the 2 billion impression mark by Valentine's Day. We have all of you to thank for this success, and appreciate your patience through some of our growing pains. Early next week, we'll be making December earnings payments to publishers -- our third such cycle. Even with this success, we continue to innovate, test and communicate with publishers to help maintain our focus on optimizing our ad widget network.

With the online ad and widget industries both evolving at break-neck speeds, I find myself constantly reading to stay ahead. I came across this fantastic and timely piece on GigaOm -- and wanted to share it with you. I found it so compelling because it captures much of the buzz around widgets today. Recent media chatter, including the GigaOm piece, are beginning to make 2008 look like the Year of the Ad Widget (this, after Newsweek declared 2007 the Year of the Widget). Many suggest an increasing push toward monetizing the millions of consumer eyeballs using widgets today. Some feel the RockYous, Slides and Clearsprings of the world -- essentially all consumer-facing widget platforms -- will find this a formidable mountain to climb. Even the ad widget networks that are seeing success around money-making widgets (i.e. WidgetBucks) are facing challenges, such as making sure our widgets continue to engage consumers without falling victim to user "ad blindness." We're embracing this challenge by constantly evaluating new approaches, technology and strategies to stay a step ahead. In fact, this quarter, we'll be announcing additional products and features, such as widget skinning, the expansion of monetizable widget content, and wide availability of YieldSense, which automatically transforms itself into a PPC, CPM or CPA ad widget on the fly, depending on highest yield.

"Those focused on a more ad-centric model are going ahead with their plans to use the widget as a more interactive billboard, but companies like Slide and RockYou may find that strategy more difficult." -- GigaOm, "Widget Me This," 1/26/08

Regardless of the various challenges and approaches -- consumer-centric or ad-centric widgets -- it remains to be seen if the two can meet in the middle and help the Year of the Ad Widget live up to its name. We certainly hope this happens -- it will be good for all of us in the industry. We are confident in our approach of creating an ad widget network first followed by a good consumer experience, and continue to work on refining that balance.

Where do you think widgets are headed this year?

Cheers,

Matt

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Matt Hulett
CEO, Mpire Corporation (the creators of WidgetBucks)
matt@mpire.com

6 comments:

How to Save Tax said...

Great ideas, Wish you all the success in all your future plans

Unknown said...

The best of luck with the project :)

One thing that does need to improve too might be some ad revenue for the West European visitors, I'm sure that there are allready better ads for that group.

The Edison blogger said...

I just signed up and I am waiting for an approval and I am delighted to have found WidgetBucks for many of my sites as I am a web designer. This will be one of the greatest inovations of the online advertising tools on the web. I wish you the best.

Jay said...

It's good to know you're as excited about the coming year as I am. I look forward to seeing what genius stuff you guys come up with. It feels good to be a part of "The Year of the Ad Widget."

Kasi Viswanathan said...

Excellent work indeed whereby we can see our progress and the graphs are good .

Keep improving Widgetbucks and we are gonna be No.1

Akshay

Laice said...

Well done for last year, 2008 will be greater as well,,,one thing I have to mention is european visitors should be included as well, there are a lot of blogs that are much more targeted towards the states and canada, but europeans have thus far been neglected. But well done for widget bucks on the whole and wish continued success.