Comments on: YAWP – Yet Another Widget Post

By: Barry Driscoll

Barry Driscoll — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:45:09 +0000

With our beer dispense equipment any one can dispense and serve both Cask or Real Ale and or Keg Beer.Many licensees are discouraged from offering cask beer since they are afraid they will not be able to keep it but with modern automatic stillages and the amazing Race Cask Ventilator which doubles the shelf life of a cask the all pubs and hotels should be able to serve good cask Ale.

By: Jermaine Eldridge

Jermaine Eldridge — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:51:10 +0000

This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”

By: Pascal Levy

Pascal Levy — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:28:32 +0000

What do you think of Visu Answers business model? (it is like #1 but with a twist)

By: jeremyliew

jeremyliew — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:33:37 +0000

Hi Brad, Getting here late to the discussion... I am inclined to agree with you that #2-4 are going to be highly valuable to users but tough to monetize as stand alone businesses. On #1, I think that artlessly jamming an ad into a users widget uninvited will generate ill will from both the owner of the content within the widget, and the owner of the page within which the widget is embedded. However, notwithstanding the difficulty in creating new forms of advertising, there are some possible business models here. VideoEgg is pioneering a comparable ad network here by explicitly partnering with social networks and sharing revenue with a relatively unobtrusive ad unit. Rockyou has done some experiments with sponsored themes that the user has chosen also. This is comparable to the idea of "friending" an advertisers profile on myspace - in both cases a user willingly associates themselves with a brand. The other possibility is a freemium model, where certain premium services to a widget are available for a fee. I posted a bit about this in January at the Lightspeed blog on the topic Whither Widgets?

By: Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 20:49:36 +0000

I have to wonder how many people downloaded their first-ever widget this week with both Yahoo and CBS Sports offering NCAA score widgets. Something tells me major advertisers at the sports sites, especially CBS online broadcasts of the games, are very happy with the traffic coming in. And the widgets are just helping increase the numbers. In my circles, when I ask people if they have a widget, they look at me like I’m looking for something to put under a wobbly table leg. I think some very fast growth is going to come to whatever business model can assemble, categorize and offer the most-useful widgets out there. The widgets that really do something — like give you NCAA scores — are going to get a lot of attention soon.

By: Nari Kannan

Nari Kannan — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 17:25:18 +0000

Long Tail is good but the other part of the body is scary but its non-presence on the web as predicted even before the dot.com boom. If you look at the 100B$+ spent on advertising on the whole it is mostly soap, shampoo, beer, movies and automobiles. Do you see them in any meaningful way anywhere on the web in any advertising?

No. That’s because currently the branding and advertising mechanisms don’t provide any incentive for anyone to click on any of these ads. If you click on an ad for say Dove Soap, then what?

That’s where widgets could hold the key! They could do things like enter into a contest right from the CNN web page or download an electronic coupon or do something else that’s interesting!

Beyond Google, beyond the Long Tail, widgets could hold the power to bring in the biggest bucks beyond “Mom and Pop’s Bobbleheads Shop” in Missisippi somewhere!

By: Adrian Bye

Adrian Bye — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:30:43 +0000

Given the mass amount of traffic this can drive, you could use the data you will collect (ie stats) to provide a behavioural targeting feed to other ad networks. ie, if you’re collecting real time information about what users are doing, you can use this data to help improve advertising targeting.

This data is highly valuable and improves the user experience. It needs to be handled carefully so that privacy expectations are met.

By: Ed Anuff

Ed Anuff — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 14:46:22 +0000

Brad, it sounds like you’ve made up your mind regarding the idea of widget distribution as an ad network, but consider this. Most widgets today are provided by their developers for the purpose of generating traffic, acquiring users, or driving transactions. That sounds a lot like advertising to me.

By: VCMike

VCMike — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:14:12 +0000

Brad: Why do you assume that widgets are tightly coupled with the Long Tail? Based on the conversations I’ve been having it seems pretty clear to me that, from a content creation perspective, widgets are being embraced pretty strongly by the head, neck and thorax too. Which — I think? — changes one’s assesment of the 4 models you laid out.

By: Simeon Simeonov

Simeon Simeonov — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:08:14 +0000

Brad, in terms of business models, I see (1) as the most likely with (3) and (4) coupled to it as part of a “whole solution” (they are difficult to monetize on their own). Completely agree w/ you re: (2), it’s a non-starter.

I have a social experiment up to test the wisdom of the crowd in sizing the market opportunity for the widget economy using the ad network business model. I invite everyone to participate.

http://simeons.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/the-market-size-for-widgets/

By: Derek Scruggs

Derek Scruggs — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:30:22 +0000

This is as good an analysis as any I’ve seen. But what I really want to know is, what’s going to happen with Twitter? They definitely had a strong presence at SXSW, but I don’t recall a single person saying “this will be huge” – not even Evan Williams on the panel I saw him on. (I admittedly only saw part of it.)

But *everyone* I talked to said something along the lines of “how the hell can they possible make money at this?”

I do give them props for best t-shirt, which simply said “wearing my twitter t-shirt”