Here’s the first of the Big or Bullshit series of posts that I’m doing with Brad Feld.
Newsweek recently suggested that 2007 may be the year of the widget. There’s lots of discussion about widgets going on in the blogosphere, widget platforms are popping up all over the place, and WidgetBox (one of the leaders and one I like) is now reporting that the “widgetsphere” (a-hem) is growing at more than 50% per month.
Widgets generally aim to do accomplish one or more of the following things: 1) improve the functionality of a site, 2) act as leaders for e-commerce or other transactions, and/or 3) promote and lead traffic to the site serving the widget. Read any popular blog and you’ll probably see widgets acting in these roles.
People are asking the question: “Do widgets have a monetization strategy that can really work?” I think too many people are looking for a “direct” monetization strategy here. To me, a widget is often just a functional ad often operating out on the long tail. The approach here is clear – provide something useful to the publisher so they’ll go out of their way to place your brand all over their property. It’s like sticking a billboard in my front yard. I’m never going to do it unless I get something out of it. But that something doesn’t have to be direct and immediate, or even necessarily quantifiable. There are many strategies for the widget economy being tested today, including micropayments for functionality, lead generation revenue shares, sponsorship, etc. I think we’ll learn more about which strategies work and which don’t this year. So far the widgets that seem to be working are just those that do something for me, so I don’t mind doing something for them. That’s the very spirit of the web at work. Looking at it from an economic standpoint, I’m trading ad space for my own cost savings (not having to develop use capabilities myself).
Some people think widgets are destroying the web. The argument is that as people post widgets from servers that are overloaded or just too slow, then every page starts to render too slowly as they wait on these third party servers. I don’t buy that argument. I think people will learn not to use crappy widgets, just like they learned not to use crappy ad servers. It’s self correcting. If they don’t learn, they’ll die too as people just stop coming back. If you think about it, the nature of a widget is very similar to that of an ad – they’re both served up by somebody other than the publisher you came to visit. Nobody serves up ads from crappy little ad servers any more (they used to).
What’s really going on here is that the web is becoming more decentralized and at the same time more personalized. We’re experiencing the web through the eyes of those we trust, and therefore through the widgets they choose.
Take FeedBurner for example – they don’t want you to sit on their web site and read feeds. They are enabling capability (and ultimately an ad network) by sitting in the middle of publishers and subscribers. Take their Headline Animator as an example. Bloggers love this, because it’s a simple brandable way to distribute their feed to potential subscribers via email or their related web sites. Here’s mine, which I haven’t bothered to customize:
If you’re on the web site, you can also see Lijit’s wijit which enables you to search my personal network, ClickCaster’s podcast widget embedded in my shownotes, SonicSwap’s widget which shows you what I was most recently listening to via iTunes, MyBlogLog’s popular recent visitors widget, and some random posts from the Colorado Startups job board. In fact, I selected the JobCoin job board over Job-a-matic mostly because they had widgets that I could use the way I wanted to use them on my site.
The biggest reason that widgets will be big is simply because users love them. Publishers love them because they save time, promote their mission, or are just plain cool. End users love them because they make the web more functional – even the smallest of publishers can pull off some pretty neat tricks on their sites.
Verdict: Widgets will be Big. They’re content with all the same benefits to the creator as ads. They’ll literally be everywhere. Widgets, RSS, and other technologies are being mashed up left and right, thereby accelerating the decentralization of the web. As more and more of the web is experienced through the portals of our choosing, widgets will help us focus on the microchunks of content that we actually care about.
Watch Brad’s blog for his take on widgets soon.
David,
Great post and we couldn’t agree with you more about the benefits and monetization opportunities of widgets.
Ed Anuff
Widgetbox
David,
It’s great to your thought on the JobCoin widgets!
And good take on widgets in general. I like to think about widgets like prepared meals in the grocery store. You can buy chef salads, already diced and mixed; seasoned chicken breasts you just pop into the oven. In 30 minutes you can create a fresh feast without all the prep work that accompanies a full meal.
It’s also worth thinking about the pre-washed lettuce, pre-cut carrot sticks, and other prepped ingredients which you can’t quite call a meal. It was this thinking that motivated the “build-your-own widget” feature in JobCoin. We recognize that when you’re providing prepared meals, you can’t make everyone happy. But by providing a “random job link” and “post a job link” and the other building blocks of the widget, people with basic HTML knowledge can piece them together however they like.
I think you’ll start to see even more of this as widgets become popular. Eventually, you won’t even realize “widgets” are being used.
Keith Schacht
CEO, JobCoin
Ed, great stuff at WidgetBox. What’s your take on the monetization strategy that we’ll see with widgets in general?
David,
In general, people create and publish widgets for 3 reasons: to generate traffic, to acquire users, and to drive transactions. So, widgets can be viewed as next-generation internet marketing tools and monetization comes from how well widgets serve those purposes. In particular, because widgets are more interactive, it appears that they can be particular effective for performance-based affiliate marketing programs.
Ed
I think Ed is correct in his assessment of why people publish widgets but I think the more interesting and valuable question why do people put widgets on their blogs or websites?
David wrote, “The biggest reason that widgets will be big is simply because users love them.” Yes, but why do people love widgets?
I love widgets for 2 reasons:
First, because widgets are a super efficient way of expressing my identity to visitors to my blog. I use both widgets and web badges (the forgotten step child of the widgetsphere).
Widgets allow me to “show” folks which music I like, the books I read, photographs of myself, blogrolls of bloggers I like, and on and on. Through association and affiliation I am organically creating an image for myself for public consumption. We all do this naturally in “real life.” Widgets enable us to do it in the 2 dimensional world of the internet. I call these “Personal Widgets.”
Secondly, I love widgets because they allow me to take data and display it in a form factor that is efficient and convenient. For example, I have a widget on my Dashboard (all widget platform will become inter operable in 12 to 18 months) of the ocean tide in Duxbury, MA. It displays lots of data about the tides in Duxbury Bay in a small form factor and that’s easily digestible. These types of “Utility Widgets” I believe will eventually go mobile. The iPhone could be the killer platform for these Utility Widgets depending on the openness of the phone.
The needs to be further development of the types of widgets that are out there. Not all widgets are the same.
I believe that most of the widget services currently in existence are putting the cart before the horse because they, as Ed explained above, are focusing on attracting the widget publishers and developers.
What Widgetbox and others are “missing” is that while this may be great they also need to provide the widget user tools to store, share, transport, and display widgets.
This is what Fred Wilson was writing about when he asked which widgets should he ditch from his blog. Blogs are not great storage locations for widgets. They are excellent for displaying widgets.
I would like to see something like a del.icio.us service whereby a service offers widgets users preconfigured html boxes onto which one could paste their widgets and tools to organize those widgets. I would think that some hosting company would develop this type of widget hosting as an ad-on service.
Anyone want to build one of these with me?
Timothy – interesting to look at it from that angle. Not sure about the del.icio.us like service you’re talking about. can you elaborate on what that would look like?
Lately, it seems that reading almost any blog also includes viewing widgets that the blogger has chosen, ostensibly to augment his commentary. In many case, however, reading a blog on subject X, accompanied by information(?) mostly unrelated to the subject, it’s like having a bunch of google or click-ads scattered about, leaving the impression that the blogger only wants to maximize page income.
It reminds me of the era when hundreds of fonts became available for documents, and quickly some authors began using horrid combinations of many fonts in their letters and reports. Shouldn’t a blogger likewise see that putting all of his widgets on every page communicates the wrong message to many readers? Does the reader even want a “Jobs” widget, an “ITunes” widget, a “best-of” widget, etc. vying for their attention? Even an innocent-appearing widget like “what’s playing” has the underlying message of selling iTunes downloads to readers (who may not, God forbid, even have an iPod).
I think of widgets as mini-web pages or applets, each of which can be of tremendous value to some and of utter inconsequence to others. Rather than having my browser block all widgets blindly to avoid undesired content, there must be a better way to render widgets of interest to each reader.
I have long desired a filtering mechanism for my browsers that could allow web servers to query the filter before sending sending ads (and now widgets?) that are of no interest to me. The mechanism should “learn” by giving me a yes/no choice on each ad or widget, and then use the keywords associated with that ad to update my filter. For web pages dependent on advertising, perhaps they first inform the viewer that they must view at least “n” ads that their filters do not block, perhaps giving them a choice of ad topic. Most readers would accept ads and widgets that had a better correlation with their interest and needs, assuming privacy isn’t invaded by spiders that construct a reader’s profile by fuzzy queries.
So for the future of widgets, I think it’s gonna be more bust than boom until the user feels in control of what he is “forced” to see. Can the marketing folks behind widgets understand this? (I’m gonna started coding a Firefox plugin to block widgets, and I don’t think I’m alone wanting such a tool.)
As always, YMMV.
After thinking about Timothy Post’s comment “What Widgetbox and others are ‘missing’ is that while this may be great they also need to provide the widget user tools to store, share, transport, and display widgets”, I think he is onto a good idea.
There are currently a few web sites that offer something like his del.icio.us-style site, i.e. http://www.pageflakes.com, where you can mashup various widget-like content on your configurable home page. I think Confluence Commons is working on a similar concept, but the details are still unavailable.
The question that Timothy raises is whether a home page or blog page or del.icio.us page is a good final resting point for the user’s widgets. I see a desktop application that doesn’t look like a browser, but maybe more like a PIM, where I can drag/drop widgets from various sources (including blogs). It might even have a widget that lets others see what widgets I have and allow me to share (or give them the link to where they can get their own instance of a widget — don’t forget monetization!).
Vista has a “widget bar” that is a primitive version of this, but the widgets are written in html and XAML (IIRC), and there currently isn’t support for Flash/FLEX widgets, or the new WPF/E stuff coming from Microsoft. Eventually, things like a contact list, phone dialer, to-do list will be available as Vista widgets, but to be really useful, they need to be backed by some type of web hosting so I can access them from the cloud via desktop app or browser or mobile.
Timothy is suggesting that the various widgets will eventually be able to be hosted in non-proprietary “containers”, including Dashboards, desktop utilities, a hosted website, etc. I think this is likely to happen, but each type of widget needs its own runtime software package (think Flash player, shockwave player, .NET3 for WPF/E, Apollo, etc.), which are often of significant size, so combining these into a desktop application installation would improve the user experience. These runtimes will also be the main limitation for many types of widgets on mobile toys.
The thing that makes these widgets so useful is their web/internet/intranet connections running behind the scene allow really useful things to authored by programmers, by web developers, or by hosting companies, while (eventually) allowing
them to be grouped and placed on a common dashboard or instrument panel at the user’s preference.
Hey, is this an idea for YAW2 (Yet another Web2.0) company :shock:?
Best from Boulder
I think we are still very early in the widget evolution phase…there are a lot of people that still dont understand what widgets are, either from a consumption or publishing perspective.
I think more and more people will get introduced to widgets through Vista (although that will take a while). I view that as a good thing for the overall widget space.
At yourminis.com we believe widgets are core building blocks for both consumption and expression. We give you the ability to build a personalized start page using our widgets (either private or public), we let you take our widget and embed them individually or as an entire page on your blog, myspace, etc. and in the near future we will support running the same widgets on your desktop leveraging Adob’s apollo platform which we just demoed at their engage conference.
Check us out at http://www.yourminis.com – would love thoughts / feedback.
Great Post. I saw this link on Brad’s Post on AlwaysOn. We totally and completely agree with you.In fact, this was a key development strategy for our InfoTollgate 2006/2007 product development strategy. Widgets are key to creating interesting “mash up” sites, as well as a way to enable things like sharable calendars, spreadsheets and other collaborative documents. No single application provider, Microsoft included, can possibly provide all of the potential widgets. The successful strategy for platform providers like us will be to make widgets simple “plug ins.” For example, using our web site technology, if you want to drop a google calendar on a page, all you have to do it enter the email address of the calendar and a unique name in an administraion form. Then just type ^calendarname^ on any content pages where you want the calendar to appear. This stuff is really cool and powerful.
I find myself nodding my head “Yes” as I read posts which speak of value to the consumer being the key. I worked on a project where we “skinned” the RealPlayer which took away its identity with a make-over which was interest-themed; like gardening, music, or football.
We produced one for the 2001 Grammy(tm) awards.
I fed an embedded swf banner every night with music theme relevant news (two short lines that softly appeared in a discrete part of the skin, then faded away). I fed it for nine months. If the user rolled their cursor over the text they could tell it was a link. The daily click-through rate was never less than 20% of all viewers and spiked at 60% for the most tasty tidbits (remember, this was music news).
This was not a banner, not blinking, didn’t have a contest, sound, images, or alarming colors. Just two lines of text shown one at a time which commanded about 2% of the real estate of the whole player.
Because the feed was relevant to folks who had downloaded this music theme skin it way out-performed banner ads (1 hit in 10K views).
I built in 25 affirmations (art is life, trust yourself, etc.) for when the player was not online.
Real Networks decided the un-branding of their player was too scary. I argued unsuccessfully that the user’s experience was the key, not their player. I was wrong, of course. They are still in business and I’m not.:shock:
We designed a skin manager to hold all the skins a user might collect. The manager could digest the collection’s themes and accept similar two line ads based on a read of the collection. The feed mechanism was anonymous for both the skin and the skin manager.
If a skin producer, say Coca-Cola, created a fun polar bear skin, but then abused their relationship by any number of annoying notice-me tricks in the message area, the user could simply throw the skin away. Not the RealPlayer itself, just the one custom interface.
We had well over a million downloads of our skin designs through Real Networks before we were designed-out of the interface. Oh yes, and we had also designed in an ssl enabled purchase element. You could buy say, a DVD, and not feel like you were “going online” as it had the appearance of occurring on your desktop.
I’ll have to check out these widgety things.