Friday, June 22, 2007
Widgets Pave Way to Market Growth
One of the best mechanisms for growing your audience is to break your content into automatically updated and easily distributable components, aka widgets.Widgets let you share headlines, multimedia content, blogs, photos to other websites with links back to your site. NewsGator has expanded its widget library that spreads formatted and branded content through RSS.
RSS readers enable consumers to bring content from around the web into one application, but they are still and underutilized technology. Widgets go one better by not requiring people to subscribe to a feed, and by delivering content to websites that people are reading. NewsGator currently works with Discovery Channel, USA Today and many other publishers who encourage websites to post selective portions of their content.
Widgets have great promise in affiliate marketing and advertising but so far have not implemented very often. Affiliates receive product information through data files or RSS feeds, but widgets have the advantage of formatting how the content (eliminating a task for affiliates) and of providing the most up to date information.
Widgets based on RSS could also reshape advertising. Instead of the same ad code being used everywhere, advertisers could customize the display for each publisher's audience. Instead of branded ads, smart widgets could update ads with pricing changes or rotate between an advertisers product catalogue.
Last week comScore established a service for tracking widget use so that companies can understand where and how their content is being used.
Posted By John Gartner at 09:59 AM
Permanent Link: Widgets Pave Way to Market Growth
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