Forbes.com posted an insightful piece today on the rise of an emerging set of ad technology companies that are helping brands conduct their media buying more efficiently and effectively as people increasingly spend their lives online.
Mpire Corporation, maker of both WidgetBucks and AdXpose, was among the private companies cited in this lengthy article. The other technology companies in the piece include Mpire partners OpenX, Rubicon Project and Pubmatic, as well as Google and Yahoo! [full article here]
Matt Hulett, Mpire's CEO, (pictured) was quoted in the article -- "We've seen half a billion dollars of venture capital poured into building optimization and planning companies." -- and Mpire's new service -- AdXpose -- was highlighted as well:
This week, Hulett's firm unveiled an application to help advertisers track on which Web sites networks place ads, where on the actual screen the ad appears and if Web surfers pause their cursor over the ad. The tool is intended to help marketers better figure out how much of their ad spending is essentially worthless.
For more information and background on AdXpose, check out last week's press coverage, press release, and demo on YouTube.
- Dean
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Forbes: New automated tech firms reshaping digital media
Monday, April 13, 2009
It's Time to Vote! Seattle 2.0 Awards 2009
This may be considered a very "local thing" but every vote counts, no matter its location. The Seattle 2.0 Awards recognizes accomplishments and exceptional people of the best of over 300 Seattle area technology startups. Voting ends April 28.
WidgetBucks is honored to be a finalist in four categories:
- Best Startup CEO: Matt Hulett
- Best Startup Technologist: Greg Harrison
- Best Blog from/about Startups: Startup Whisperer by Matt Hulett
- Best Venture Capitalist: Bill Bryant, WidgetBucks board member and Venture Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which led WidgetBucks' Series B funding in June 2008.
Here's a full list of categories -- Vote now!
- Best Startup
- Best Boot-strapped Startup
- Best Startup CEO
- Best Startup Technologist
- Best Venture Capitalist
- Best Angel Investor
- Best Startup Product Designer
- Best Service Provider to Startups
- Best Blog from/about Startup
- Best Social Event for Startups
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Beginner's Guide to Ad Optimization
WidgetBucks CEO Matt Hulett is a featured contributor in Monday's edition of Adotas, one of the interactive advertising's most targeted publications. Matt delves into the world of ad optimization, where he feels there is a lot of innovation happening today despite very little other good news coming from within the sector.
Matt discusses a group of optimization startups, including WidgetBucks, that are adding a tremendous layer of value between the supply and demand. These companies are still getting funding when other sectors have gone dry, and some have even been acquired recently.
The five areas of focus in what Matt calls the "ad optimization stack" include:
- Container Optimization. Companies such as SnapAds, Tumri, Clearspring, Gigya and WidgetBucks
- Targeting Optimization. Companies such as BlueKai, Exelate, Lookery and OthersOnline
- Yield Optimization. Companies such as Pubmatic, Rubicon Project, YieldBuild, YieldX and WidgetBucks
- Exchanges. Companies such as Right Media’s Publisher Media Exchange, Microsoft’s AdECN, DoubleClick
- Auction-based marketplaces. Companies such as ContextWeb's ADSDAQ, AdBite, Turn, Google AdSense, and Yahoo! Publisher Network
Friday, March 6, 2009
Three Reasons Why Amazon Should Buy Twitter
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Eric Engleman of Seattle's TechFlash also wrote about this today as well.
Speaking of Twitter, check out this like-gold add-on that makes your Google searches real-time with Twitter.
Do you use Twitter? If so, start following WidgetBucks here.
- Dean
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Part II: Fast Company TV's Robert Scoble Inside WidgetBucks
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Part II of II (Watch Part I now)
Monday, March 2, 2009
Peek Inside WidgetBucks with Fast Company TV's Robert Scoble, Part I
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Robert also interviews WidgetBucks Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Greg Harrison, who explains WidgetBucks' biggest challenge today, its stance on cloud computing and iframes, as well as how lack of Flash capability on mobile devices like iPhone limit the user experience, especially with ads.
Part I of II (Part II comes tomorrow)
Monday, February 9, 2009
WidgetBucks Profiled on Vator.tv
Earlier today, Vator.tv, the voice of the entrepreneur, posted a WidgetBucks profile on its site along with a video interview with CEO Matt Hulett. If you haven't looked into Vator.tv, you should. It's a social media company for businesses, leveraging community-generated content to connect investors, strategic partners and startups. The site's CEO and co-founder is Bambi Francisco, who started the site a little shy of two years ago. If you've followed the tech space for any length of time, Bambi's name probably rings a bell. She's written for Dow Jones MarketWatch and also produced at CNN's financial news network.
She did a nice job of capturing WidgetBucks in this piece. Check out the written piece here or the video below, and/or view WidgetBucks' profile on Vator.tv:
Monday, February 2, 2009
Former aQuantive CFO Michael Vernon Joins WidgetBucks Board
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For those of you who know about Michael, this is a real coup for us here at WidgetBucks. For those of you who don't, Michael was the former CFO at aQuantive (acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $6B -- yes, with a B) so he knows online advertising technology, knows how to inject ‘big thinking’ into an emerging company like ours, and he's a fantastic complement to our existing experienced Board and management team. His background includes being responsible for financially guiding aQuantive to profitability and a multi-billion dollar market cap before the Microsoft acquisition.
He joins WidgetBucks' Board at an important time, as we hit our second full year of rapid growth after seeing ad impression volume grew by 150 percent over the course of 2008.
In Michael's words: “When it comes to core fundamentals within the online advertising space – monetization, expansion and targeting – WidgetBucks is well positioned to be a big ad play. What further attracted me to this appointment is the management team’s successful history, new proprietary optimization technology, including YieldSense, and their sound financial backing and infrastructure.”
We've added a lot of industry experience lately. Michael is the third industry veteran to join WidgetBucks’ management team and/or Board in the last several months: Chief Revenue Officer Kirby Winfield joined in August, while Chief Financial Officer Jeff Bergstrom came on board in October. Combined, the two chief officers represent over $3 billion in shareholder value from past acquisitions.
Welcome, Michael!
- Matt Hulett
CEO, WidgetBucks
Friday, December 12, 2008
WidgetBucks Blog Survey: What Do You Want to Read About?
An interesting study from Forrester Research came out this week, examining how much people trust various online information resources. Not surprisingly, email from people they know tops the list at 77% (unless it's one of those chain emails that you have to forward in an hour or your laptop will explode). BusinessWeek also examined the trend.
What seemed to be most interesting, however, was what appeared on the bottom of the list: corporate blogs. Just 16% of people trust company blogs as a source of information. Most feel corporate blogs are just repackaged press releases, too promotional, or that they don't share unvarnished information. That's probably true in many cases -- and I think it's something that can really improve as blogging goes mainstream.
What's Ahead for the WidgetBucks Blog
In 2009, we are enhancing the WidgetBucks blog to include more writers and contributors, and expand the topics we cover - and to define those topics, we're asking for your help. Please vote for your most desired subjects that you would find most helpful to you as a publisher and we'll focus on including those subjects during the coming year:
In fact, you may have already read a few posts from some additional team members, including Gary Kamikawa, WidgetBucks' VP of Interactive Marketing, who oversees our publisher relations group, as well as Kirby Winfield, our Chief Revenue Officer. Given Kirby's sales focus, his posts will naturally have an advertiser lens over them -- which can be helpful as a publisher to understand what advertisers are seeking. CEO Matt Hulett will also continue to contribute as he did over our first year. You can also read Matt's musings at http://startupwhisperer.com and http://seattle20.com.
So thanks for voting or adding topics we don't have on the list.
- Dean Jutilla
Marketing Director
WidgetBucks
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Hulett: What's Ahead at WidgetBucks
It seems wherever you turn today, the economic news seems to be bad -- and justifiably so. Layoffs, bailouts, credit crunch, the list goes on and on. However, this is also a time of opportunity -- at least, that's how we're viewing it here at WidgetBucks.
To that end, I felt it was important to give you an update on some of our key initiatives and how we're attacking these uncertain times - but most importantly, how these key projects are relevant to you, our publishers.
New Holiday Creative: As we announced yesterday, we've rolled out some new shopping ad widget designs within WidgetBucks. One of my favorite parts of these three new designs is the Sensible Santa skin that works in all the different sized widgets. So check out Thumbnail Bonanza, Single Product Showcase and Triple Product Showcase to get your holiday-minded site visitors to do some clicking. E-commerce Guide highlighted these designs in a story today.
YieldSense: You'll be hearing more about this new yield management technology in the coming weeks, but I wanted to give you all an early line on this. We recognize that as your ad serving decisions become more complex, you will likely welcome an easier solution, one that is focused on managing and maximizing your yield yet still gives you flexibility and choice. Be on the look out for one such solution coming up shortly.
Advertiser Solutions: While we are aggressively rolling out new publisher-focused services, we're simultaneously developing solutions for our advertising partners. This includes providing better segment targeting for brand marketers across the WidgetBucks network, as well as expanded analysis around user engagement. While this may not seem to have direct impact on you as a publisher, it ultimately does. Providing stronger solutions to advertisers means deeper relationships with them, resulting in higher eCPMs. Like YieldSense, you'll be hearing more about this soon.
At a company level, this is a time we are very focused as a team on creating tools and services that maximize publishers' earnings. On a macro-economic level, like everyone else, we are certainly monitoring the signs, and then making prudent decisions around spending, hiring, and business terms.
When the dust settles, what form will this all take? That's obviously very difficult to say - the future is still uncharted amid a global economic crisis; however, I believe the Web 2.0 world as we know it will go through a transformation. Nonetheless, we are confident that WidgetBucks is well positioned to be one of the players standing and prospering when things settle out.
Thanks for your continued support and use of WidgetBucks!
- Matt Hulett
CEO, WidgetBucks
Monday, October 27, 2008
WidgetBucks Welcomes Bergstrom as CFO
As WidgetBucks’ CFO, Jeff is responsible for all things financial, including managing the company’s financial strategy and operations, as well as overseeing and implementing all financial reporting, forecasting and tax functions.
Jeff spent five years at Internet company Go2Net from 1997-2001, and during that time, he helped the company grow to over $110M in annual revenue. He was deeply involved with the purchase and integration of nine companies in two years, and also led the financial team ultimately responsible for the acquisition by InfoSpace for approximately $2.0B. Most recently, he was CFO of The PowerTech Group, a security software products firm that recently sold to a portfolio company of the Audax Group.
Matt Hulett, WidgetBucks CEO and Chairman: "Jeff brings an incredible breadth of financial experience perfectly suited to WidgetBucks. He joins us at just the right time as WidgetBucks embarks on its second year well positioned to reinvigorate online advertising, even during these challenging economic times. Jeff has shown that he knows what it takes to win."
Jeff's appointment is WidgetBucks' second chief officer addition in the last two months: In August, Chief Revenue Officer Kirby Winfield joined the team
Welcome to the team, Jeff.
- Dean
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
WidgetBucks' Hulett Speaking at WTIA Event
WidgetBucks CEO Matt Hulett is joining an accomplished cast of panelists at Thursday night's Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) event.
The night's discussion topic is "Cashing In on Web Services: The Display Ad Model and Beyond" and delves into options beyond traditional display ads, as well as trends and innovations in monetizing Web services today.
The full slate of panelists:
- Matt Hulett, CEO, WidgetBucks
- Andy Liu, CEO, BuddyTV
- Mike Metzger, CEO, PayScale
- Spencer Rascoff, CFO & VP, Marketing, Zillow.com
- Tony Wright, Co-Founder and CEO, RescueTime
- Scott Jacobson, Principal, Madrona Venture Group (moderator)
- Dean
Friday, September 19, 2008
WidgetBucks' Hulett Honored by Puget Sound Biz Journal
Each year the Puget Sound Business Journal's 40-Under-40 awards program spotlights the next generation of business leaders who work hard to drive the business community’s future and demonstrate dynamic leadership and social responsibility. We are pleased to announce that WidgetBucks CEO Matt Hulett, 38, is part of the 2008 class. Matt and the other 39 recipients were honored Thursday night.
Matt is a serial entrepreneur who has successfully built profitable companies from scratch. After joining Mpire, WidgetBucks' parent company, as CEO in early 2006, he turned what was a standalone comparison shopping site into a multi-vertical ad distribution platform that serves over a billion impressions a month, known as WidgetBucks. Matt is a proud fourth-generation Seattleite, whose grandfather was a lumberjack in the small town of Port Angeles in the Puget Sound area. Check out the rest of Matt's bio here.
Anyone wanting to glean Matt's extensive executive business insights can read his personal blog, http://startupwhisperer.com.
Congratulations, Matt!
- The Team
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
WidgetBucks Welcomes Winfield as CRO
Hi everyone! Matt Hulett, CEO of WidgetBucks, here to share some fun news. Today WidgetBucks is happy to welcome Kirby Winfield as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). In his new role, he’s responsible for the company’s advertising sales and distribution strategy.
WidgetBucks’ rocket ship growth has continued and Kirby comes in at just the right time as we expand our product verticals and advertiser relationships to earn higher revenues for our publishers. So what better title than Chief Revenue Officer, right?
Kirby is an Internet media veteran who brings great background to WidgetBucks. Back in 1996, when people started monetizing the Web, Kirby (pictured) was there and has been working in online media, sales and advertising ever since, including Marchex and Go2Net (acquired by InfoSpace).
He’s got a proven track record of understanding how to scale businesses quickly and also knows a lot about different types of ad models, including those brand-focused and performance-based.
From time to time, Kirby will be posting on this blog across various topics, including new trends in online ads, industry perspective and what he’s seeing in the ad sales world.
Kirby, welcome aboard!
- Matt
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
2008: The Year of the Ad Widget
Hi 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," 1/26/08Regardless 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
====================
Matt Hulett
CEO, Mpire Corporation (the creators of WidgetBucks)
matt@mpire.com
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Hulett: WidgetBucks' RPC Jumps More Than 20 Percent
Matt Hulett, CEO of Mpire (the company who has created WidgetBucks), participated in the first of what we anticipate will be many podcasts to give publishers some key product and business insights. The call (also accessible through the icon to the left) focused on recent updates and changes within the WidgetBucks ecosystem, specifically an update on Revenue-Per-Click (RPC) -- which has seen at least a 20 percent jump -- earnings policies and a sneak peek at new things ahead. Below are highlights of the podcast with Matt:
WidgetBucks growth since launching October 2 has been phenomenal. Last month we served 200 million ad impressions and are on track to more than double that in November. As with any kind of hyper growth, it's important to maintain your network quality. Over the last week or so, the WidgetBucks team has implemented several policies to boost RPCs, including international click filtering and focusing on suspending publishers who are not following our terms of service, specifically click fraud, pornography, non-English language sites, ad-only sites, and non-valid or false domains.
The result has been a strong jump in RPC numbers, up by 20 percent, and even higher in some categories. Reporting figures have now been updated and should reflect levels of a few weeks ago. Long term, Matt discussed looking at supporting/crediting traffic from users outside the U.S. and Canada.
Matt also mentioned that over the next couple of weeks, publishers will be seeing 9 new widget styles that feature a new “look and feel” and search functionality from inside the widgets. WidgetBucks will also be introducing new brand sponsorship pre-roll advertising. The goal is to enable CPM-style brand advertising into the WidgetBucks network to continue to keep RPCs high.
The holidays are ahead of us and implementing WidgetBucks shopping-oriented advertising is a great way to see higher CTRs and overall monetization. Matt shared some highlights of a recent Maritz Research Group poll found that on "Cyber Monday" -- the first Monday after U.S. Thanksgiving when most people in the U.S. go back to work -- nearly 9 in 10 made purchases from the office on that day compared to the standard 6 in 10 who shop online while in the workplace. Last year, Cyber Monday sales totaled $687 million, up from $484 million in 2005. As you know, all online ads generate higher conversions this time of year and WidgetBucks can be a great source of revenue for you.
Matt concluded by wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving and reiterating our long-term commitment to helping publishers earn revenue from their sites and pages. We know that we have to earn your trust on every page load. And that we continue to look for your input and feedback.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
WidgetBucks Podcast with Matt Hulett
Matt Hulett, CEO or Mpire, posted this Podcast about WidgetBucks. 
Monday, October 1, 2007
WidgetBucks Among Us!
Aloha everyone!
A big mahalo to all of you who attended our WidgetBucks launch party on Thursday night here in Seattle. We had a great time and hope you did as well.
For you locals you who couldn’t make and those out of town, we wanted to fill you in on WidgetBucks and give you a chance to see what happened at the party. WidgetBucks is a new advertising network of shopping trend widgets. We provide publishers, affiliates and bloggers with the ability to earn more than 3-4 times more money than they are making through traditional ad networks.
You can see some a sample sidebar widget to the right of this blog and a full suite of our widgets here.
We’d love for you to give WidgetBucks a try. If you sign-up now, we’ll even bonus your account $25 to get the ball rolling. Affiliates, you can also earn a 10 percent referral fee based on the commissions earned by the people they refer. This 10 percent lasts for the full 12 months after the new member joins. Cha-ching!
Any questions, just let us know at info@widgetbucks.com
Cheers,
Matt
Matt Hulett
President & CEO
Mpire Corporation
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