Sexy Widget

Clearspring's Widget Ads

TechCrunch is reporting that Clearspring is publicly launching widget powered advertisements at AdTech.  Just to be clear, these are not ads overlaid on top of the widgets of the publishers who use Clearspring - rather, these widgets ARE the ads.  Here's an example:

These sorts of ads are a nice fit for Clearspring because of their strong relationships with large media companies with plenty of budget for brand oriented ad campaigns.

Those who have been reading Sexy Widget for a long time might remember that this is something that Bitty Browser was experimenting with a while back.

For the widget platforms, it's starting to approach the time to start making some money.  The technology and tools have been brought to market, the data centers have been built out, and these companies have proven that they can give their services away.

Over the coming weeks and months, I expect to see more announcements from companies like Clearspring, Widgetbox, Musestorm, and Gigya regarding how they intend to monetize their footprints.

Google AdSense and Widgets

My employer was the very first site on the Web to syndicate Google AdSense to its community via the AdSense API.  Members who contribute content are able to share in the ad revenue associated with that content via this integration with Google AdSense.

For a long time, I've been been very keen to help our members drop their Adsense Publisher IDs into their user generated widgets.  I felt that this would be an incredible motivator for our members to really get creative in trying to create viral content.  Due to the massive number of pageviews that a popular widget can accumulate, I envisioned scenarios where our content creators could make some real money, and not the $20-30 per month that our top contributors make now.

Unfortunately, Google has yet to give us the green light.  About a month ago, I got the opportunity to talk this vision through with a couple of senior AdSense product managers, and show them exactly the sorts of widgets in which the AdSense Ads would appear.   I had also requested permission on two previous occasions.

To make a long story short, they're just not ready yet.  The sticking point appears to be the lack of control that Google would have in where their network of advertisers would show up.  And on that level, they're absolutely right.  There would be nothing to stop the publisher of nazi child porn site from grabbing a RateItAll widget, and running that widget with its associated AdSense ads on their site.

It's a shame, because in the world of revenue sharing, user generated widgets + Google AdSense would seem to be a killer combination.  If I were one of the also-ran contextual ad networks such as YPN or MSN AdCenter, I would probably try and take this opportunity to rock the boat a little bit.