StickiWidgets

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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Not to be out done by the recent press release of RockYou’s $35M round of funding, KickApps and Clearspring announces a partnership to “ACCELERATE
WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING.”

We’ve not seen any of the KickApps Widget Studio beta or features that spawn out of this partnership, so this is a very interesting development and we’ll keep an eye on it.

KICKAPPS AND CLEARSPRING PARTNER TO
ACCELERATE WIDGET CREATION, DISTRIBUTION AND ADVERTISING

Companies Collaborate on Advancing KickApps’ WidgeAD™ Format and Clearspring’s Widget Ad Network

New York and Mc Lean, VA, June 10, 2008 — KickApps, the leading on demand social media platform, and Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, today announced a strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization. Under the agreement, Clearspring will promote KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base. This will enable Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services to provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform.

more…

Congratulations to Hooman and everyone over at Clearspring. This shows a healthy widget ecosystem and the numbers reported by Clearspring are impressive.

• 126M unique widget viewers in March
• More than 33B widget views served since its launch in 2007

Official Press Release:

WORLD’S LARGEST WIDGET SYNDICATOR CLEARSPRING SECURES $18 MILLION IN FUNDING

New Enterprise Associates Leads the Round

McLean, Va., May 21, 2008 — Clearspring Technologies Inc., the world’s largest widget syndication and tracking service, has secured $18 million in a series C funding round that includes leading venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Novak Biddle Venture Partners and other current investors. The new round will fund expansion of Clearspring’s viral marketing network, which currently serves and tracks almost four billion widgets monthly. It will also be used to extend Clearspring’s reach into international markets and further develop its rapidly growing advertising network and vast data infrastructure and optimization services. Clearspring’s category leadership is well-established — according to comScore’s Widget Metrix report, Clearspring tallied 126 million unique widget viewers in March 2008, making it the No. 1 widget platform in the world.

“No other widget company has the breadth of relationships with content publishers, advertisers, developers and social media, as well as the full suite of widget services including syndication, in-depth analytics and easy-to-use monetization tools,” said Harry Weller, partner at NEA. “Clearspring is the leader in this space, and we look forward to working with the company as it expands its platform and extends its reach into global markets.”

Read the entire press release here.