Gigya Launches Widget Ad Network

Startup Gigya has launched an advertising network to deliver and track widget ads on social networks, blogs and other sites.

Gigya's network competes with rivals such as Google's Gadget Ads and a widget ad network launched last year by Clearspring. Each is aiming to capitalize on the popularity of widgets as an engaging way to market products and services on social media.

Widget ads--messages appearing in mini-programs popping up on Web sites--will help boost social network advertising by 70% to $1.6 billion in 2008, according to a recent projection by eMarketer.

Consumer adoption rates have been especially impressive. Almost 586 million individual Internet users viewed a piece of widget software in November 2007, according to data comScore provided exclusively to BusinessWeek.com this month.

Gigya's ad network so far consists of 400 widget publishers and advertisers including Sony BMG's Jive Records, Kimberly-Clark and Disney. Their widget ads appear on top social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Black Planet and Freewebs.

What sets Gigya's ad network apart from those of its competitors is that the widgets it distributes are themselves the ads rather than content widgets into which ads can be placed, said Ben Pashman, Gigya's vice president of business development. Advertisers only pay if someone actively installs a widget on their profile page, blog or Web site. Then Gigya and the widget publisher each get a share of the revenue generated by click-throughs.

"We're rolling up hundreds of widget publishers and allowing guaranteed distribution of brand advertising widgets," Pashman said. The company's system can handle tens of thousands of widget installs per day, letting advertisers buy inventory like other interactive media, with specific budgets and campaign lengths.

Increasingly, marketers are adding widget advertising to ad buys that include other types of rich media formats such as video ads and home page take-overs, Pashman said.

Gigya uses its Wildfire technology to track how users are interacting with a widget's features and functionality. The technology tracks more than 2 billion widget impressions per month. Wildfire also promotes viral distribution by allowing users to easily grab and share the widgets via social networks, e-mail and bookmarking sites.

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