WidgetBucks Posts May Earnings

WidgetBucks publishers can now view May earnings on their MyBucks pages. Also, May earnings payments will be distributed by July 10.

- Dean

A WidgetWebExpo Fly-by

WidgetWebExpo is taking place in Brooklyn, New York, this week. Earlier today, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures held a keynote on, what else, widgets. Lawrence Coburn of Sexywidget was in the audience and provided a verbatim recap of Fred's talk, which opined that widgets are too cumbersome and that people want to consume info in a river (i.e. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook Newsfeed, etc.). Also, that engagement of widgets is what matters -- who’s clicking and doing what.

What do you think?

WidgetBucks Secures $10 Million Investment to Expand Ad Widget Network

We're very pleased today to announce that WidgetBucks has secured $10 million in Series B funding.

The investment was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the world’s premier venture capital firms. Ignition Partners, which supplied the company’s original venture backing, also participated in the financing. This investment really allows us to expand our vision as an ad network, which will only mean great things for our publishers.

We plan to put greater resources into our YieldSense technology to further optimize your earnings and simplify your ad serving decisions. We also plan to build more revenue options around our ad widgets, including more ways to monetize international traffic and increase the number of ad model options for you. And finally, we'll continue innovating around ad design and content for those ads, creating things such as mash-up ads with a choice of content feeds within the same widget. Expanding our team is also a priority, particularly around engineering, sales and support.

According to Bill Bryant (pictured at left), startup veteran and venture partner at DFJ, the investment decision in WidgetBucks was simple. “DFJ invests in companies that are bringing disruptive technology to major sectors of the Internet economy. We love what WidgetBucks has built around its ecommerce platform. While the recent growth has been phenomenal, what we invested in is the promise to truly transform performance-based advertising for publishers.”

Since launch in October 2007, WidgetBucks has had rocket-ship growth, and your participation as a publisher has brought us to this successful milestone. We just surpassed 5 billion total ad widget impressions, and July is projected to be our first 1 billion impression month.

Again, we appreciate your participation in our program. As our ad network continues to "season" and mature, we look forward to expanding your earning potential.

Click the YouTube logo to see a video message from myself and CTO & Co-Founder Greg Harrison. Also read our full press release here.




Matt Hulett
CEO, WidgetBucks

WidgetBucks Payments Shipping Through End of Week

The sweet sound of cha-ching will be hitting PayPal accounts through Friday this week as WidgetBucks earnings for April get distributed. A softer-sounding cha-ching -- that from snail mail checks -- will also be heard this week. Incidentally, few publishers are still electing to receive their payments by check. As always, we encourage you, if all possible, to switch to PayPal. There is no fee when receiving the money, it's much faster, and more secure.

- Dean

Electronics/Gadgets Lead Way in Skin Poll

A recent poll of publishers has Electronics/Gadgets skins as the preferred skin style, gaining 15 percent of the nearly 200 votes. Tech/Computers and Entertainment/Pop Culture are tied for the second most preferred style, each receiving 13 percent of the votes. a Video Games style has also been a popular choice. The poll is below and remains open through Friday (June 13) so be sure to let us know what you'd like to see in a skin gallery on WidgetBucks.

- Dean

WidgetBucks Joins ProBlogger's Quarterly Top Earner List

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger today posted his quarterly list of top income streams, where WidgetBucks is a newcomer and ranked No. 8. Rowse (pictured at left) highlights each entry, including this excerpt on WidgetBucks:

WidgetBucks is similar to Chitika and Shopzilla in many respects and works well on product related sites. It does best on sites with US traffic (the reason I’ve not used it as much as I get a lot of international traffic) so if you have a product related site with a US audience it’d be a no brainer to try out WidgetBucks. I’m hoping they’ll continue to expand their offerings in terms of ad types and visitor location.

In fact, publishers will be hearing a lot more about WidgetBucks' product and distribution expansion plans, including international CPC content, in the coming weeks. Stay tuned...

Dean