I’ve been following Widgetbox for a while now, and from the get go, they’ve had a slightly different approach than some of the other widget infrastructure providers.
The biggest difference has been in their emphasis on a central hub to power widget distribution. While companies like ClearSpring and Gigya have made their living at the edge, Widgetbox has stubbornly continued to invest in their widget gallery at Widgetbox.com.
This strategy has not been without its costs. Gigya and Clearspring have been able to achieve wider reach than Widgetbox has by focusing on widget distribution “in the wild” as opposed to via a central gallery.
But as I have stated repeatedly on this blog, a robust destination site to complement an edge presence is an important asset. A destination site provides landing pages for organic search traffic, typically generates higher CPMs, and offers a more branded experience for the user.
With the launch of its Blog Network last week, Widgetbox is putting its destination site into play in a big way. On paper, this is a text book hub & spoke play – a central destination site working in tandem with a distributed presence in an attempt to achieve the network effect.
Here’s how it works:
- Bloggers submit their blog to one of 29 categories on the Widgetbox network and embed the corresponding widget code on their blog
- Widgetbox crawls each blog to ensure that the widget code has been embedded
- Local leaderboards on each Widgetbox.com channel display top blogs and a river of recent posts from that category, and the network widget displays top posts from that category
So let’s break this down:
Widgetbox’s destination site does about 800K uniques per month. They already have a significant blogger outreach presence via their “Blidget” product – a tool that converts RSS feeds into embeddable Flash widgets.
In order to try and generate a network effect, they have associated a “selfish interest” with the action of embedding a Widgetbox network widget. Those bloggers who embed the widget will receive click through traffic from both the network landing page (via the recent post river and the top blog leaderboard) as well as from the edge (other blogs that embed the network widget). The more bloggers participate, the bigger the network, the better the network landing page on Widgetbox.com, and the more clicks that get distributed out.
This isn’t a new idea – now defunct startup Spotplex tried something similar a while back (you can read my review here).
But Widgetbox is not Spotplex. They have a solid blogger base to work with, they have a bigger brand, and they have a much bigger foundation of destination site traffic to mete out to participating blogs.
I’m bullish on the idea, as it incorporates some of my favorite things; tapping into selfish interest, local leaderboards, rivers of content, and destination site and edge working together. Here's a screenshot of one of their network landing pages.
