Tuesday, January 22, 2008
How to Market a Widget
Any app, any place, drawing content from anywhere. That's the promise of widgets that marketers are rushing towards.From Facebook to MySpace to Netvibes, widgets are seen as a lucrative alternative to AdSense and banner ads in generation revenue for publishers while creating a better user experience. Widgets' popularity is their ability to add useful but simple features to organize one's social and browsing experience. Custom home pages are a good example as we continue to be over saturated with info. We need to spend more time in a few relevant places and less time jumping from website to website, and widgets can bring it all together.
The widget euphoria has resulted in the over valuation of startup Slide, and others will follow.
The challenge is to integrate advertising that is relevant and unobtrusive. The "message" has to be seamlessly integrated to appear natural with the rest of the content, as well as the medium (video, audio, static).
Microsoft wanted its Dot-net platform to be the unifying platform for application development, but the free market has led to things like Flash and Javascript as being better tools for developers. If you build something useful, they will come. If you build it so it can generate a smattering of revenue, you can be profitable.
What are your favorite widget, and is anyone making money off of it?
By John Gartner at 01:30 PM | Comments (1)
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