NewsGator announced today that it is partnering with Agence France-Presse to deliver a widget featuring Olympics news and events coverage. Generally this isn’t really big news. With RSS feeds and generic RSS widgets abound, any site can pretty much obtain a Olympics news and events widget.
The really interesting part of this announcement is that the widgets will be advertising supported and brandable. A media property can sign-up to be a partner and provide a branding logo to be included in one of three widget templates. With this partnership you get two sets of code for deployment. One will be to display the widget, whether it be headlines, photos or videos. The second code snippet is to be deployed on the media property, which will be where the end-users actually read the content linked to in the widget. The widget itself is of course grabable with the usual distribution destinations.
What all this means is that the media property receives a branded widget which links back to that media property for consumption of the actual content. On top of that, not only is the widget and premium content free of charge, that media property will receive a $0.20 CPM. That’s a pretty sweet deal; free widget, free content, free traffic back to view the content on your site and $0.20 CPM to boot.
Unfortunately, the program requires a minimum of 12,000 widget views per day so not everyone can participate. If that’s the case you will just have to take a widget from one of the partners and drive traffic to them.
There’s a few quick things we would have liked to see or noticed. First, we would have liked to see the widget view requirement lower, but we do understand that there’s a guaranteed CPM involved. Second, we did not see where a non-qualifying property can go and grab other partner widgets. Third, the example widget they have on their site has a broken layout.
Head over to NewsGator for more information and registration into the Olympics widget program…
Press Release
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Agence France-Presse and NewsGator Partner to Offer Media Companies Free, Co-Branded Sports Widgets
July 9 2008 6:55 AM
Olympics Widgets Provide Media Companies With Advertising Revenue & Complimentary Premium Content
Denver, Colo. — July 9, 2008 — NewsGator Technologies Inc. today announced a partnership with Agence France-Presse (AFP) to provide widgets featuring Olympics news and event coverage to media sites at no charge. With this program, media companies receive complimentary access to premium AFP content prepackaged in branded and engaging widgets that they can add to their Web site. The Olympics widgets are supported by advertising and approved distribution partners are eligible to receive a portion of the advertising revenue generated by the widgets.
NewsGator-hosted AFP widgets feature popular Olympics content including a countdown to the Games, event news and results, sports animations, videos, photos, quizzes and more. Each widget includes the media company’s logo and links to Olympics-related articles and content. The Olympic content is provided by AFP and actually resides on the media company’s Web site. A media company simply places the widgets on their site. Readers can then view the widgets and port them to their favorite Web location. Every time a reader clicks on one of the widget links they are directed back to the media company’s Web site where the full content is displayed on Web pages that can be monetized with ads.
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