Widget Advertising Standards
From Widget Standards
Contents |
3 types of widgets with ads
Max Levchin of Slide has said that he pitches his widgets to advertisers as “millions of little TVs”. These little TVs (and their little commercials) come in 3 varieties: Widgets that have no advertising embedded but generate ad revenue from the page that they are created from (we won’t discuss) Widgets that embed some kind of advertising within the widget Widgets that are purely advertising (often around one brand)
Widgets that embed ads
Widgets that embed some form of advertising; whether contextual, banner, video, etc., have operated on quite a slippery slope so far. On the one hand, widget makers want to provide an engaging widget to their adopters that does what the widget says it does. On the other hand, they’d love to sneak some ads into their widgets (and so would advertisers)
Problems with widgets that embed ads
- These widgets have had a hard time generating revenue, as:
- Users don’t like ads
- Website publishers and social networks don’t like ads that don’t generate revenue for their site
- Social networks do not allow JavaScript
- No widget standard to point to on in-widget ad units
- No widget standard on tracking these ad units (esp. in regards to how to differentiate between the page, the widget and the ad)
Widgets that are ads
A number of widgets are entirely designed to be ads – no matter how interactive they are (which is of course added value to the brand being advertised) they are still ads. Again, there are no set standards or metrics around these types of ads (anyone seeing a trend here?) Again, placement should be a major factor in the measuring the value of these ads, just as banners were in web 1.0.
