• by Tameka Kee , August 6, 2007

Slide, the online personal media network that has surged to the top of comScore's Widget Metrix, has rolled out a widget advertising program and signed Paramount Pictures and Discovery Networks as premiere partners.

In the coming weeks, Discovery and Paramount will use Slide's photo and video widgets to promote TV shows and movies across the Slide network (which includes such multiple social networking platforms as Facebook and Bebo). Users can customize the portable applications with a number of branded skins, in-video stickers and opt-in pre-rolls.

With Slide's widgets garnering more than 117 million unique views in the month of April alone, according to comScore, they have the potential to reach almost 14% of the global online population.

While brands like Mozilla and MGA Entertainment have used Slide's widgets to promote their Firefox and Bratz products, respectively, the latest announcement comes as Slide opens up its program to all advertisers.

According to Sonya Chawla, Slide's senior director of advertising, the company had two clear goals in developing its widget ad model--scalability and making sure the quality user experience remained intact. "All initial advertising is entirely user-selected, because we view our users as brand ambassadors," said Chawla. "We didn't want to just slap ads inside widgets."

Making it easy for advertisers and agencies to incorporate widgets into their media plans, Slide's technology is compatible with established ad-serving platforms like DART and ATLAS, and is sold using standard industry metrics.

Chawla added that the company will work with brand partners as warranted to develop metrics that measure the level of engagement. "A user who puts a Discovery branded skin on their Bebo page is delivering an impression, but how do you compare that to another brand's display ad running at the same time?" asked Chawla.

The Slide widgets allow advertisers to track and manage each piece of creative, from the time a user installs the application to when a video is viewed, to when an ad is clicked on--and Slide offers a number of payment models, from pay per download to cost per impression.

Advertisers are increasingly turning to widgets as the applications grow in popularity across a number of demographics, and Slide is reporting that the dollars are substantial. "The commitments we're getting are not coming out of innovation budgets," said Chawla. "These are long-term, six-figure deals, for multiple campaigns."