• Mediaweek, Friday, March 14, 2008 11 AM

If the future is about the portability of ads and content, then the widget business is a very good place to be. KickApps chairman Eric Alterman says portability could one day be so commonplace that "every consumer facing Web site will be a collection of widgets." Alterman, speaking at the McGraw Hill Companies' Media Summit in New York, predicted that ad networks would also simply become a collection of widgets, or portable Web-based software programs. He even went so far as to say that, "all the money on the Internet will be in that space...and traditional media will be a leader."

However, traditional media companies are struggling to embrace and deploy widgets as a marketing tactic. Dan Riess, vice president, marketing and ad solutions for Turner, pointed out that widgets provide two values for brands: marketing and media. While the marketing side is straightforward, he said the media side is not, because media needs to be monetized. He added that content portability is becoming an inevitable fact of life for media companies: "It's increasingly hard for sites to expect users to come through your door," he said, adding that functions like widgets mean revenue sharing and a loss of control, two things traditional media companies don't like.

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