Gigya Archive

Last week the NY Video 2.0 meetup was held. Unfortunately I was unable to make it but Andy Robson from 3rdRail Inc captured all of the presentations and the video is below. The presenting companies included: Animoto, Brightcove, Innovid, Gigya and Ooyala.

comScore will release their latest Widget Metrix report later this morning. From the report, "A total of 615 million people, representing 65% of the worldwide internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in June 2008." While this number seems high, I would have expected it to be even higher. Nearly every page has a widget on it across the Internet these days.

I’d wonder exactly what comScore defines as a widget. Must a widget need to be viewable by the user to be counted? Would script code used in analytics tracking be considered a widget? I still believe that widgets will replace most traditional online display banner advertising by the end of 2009. The benefits of widgetizing an ad far outweight the cost to implement.

Gigya leads the pack serving over 150 million widgets during the period. In the U.S., Gigya served over 55 million widgets, giving them a 29.2% market share. It’s interesting to look at the charts below and compare a widget distribution platform like Gigya with a widget provider like Slide. Gigya doesn’t produce their own widgets, they help widget creators with distribution, monetization and analytics. Slide creates and distributes their own widgets. It’s hard to do a direct comparison.

(comScore asked that we remove the top 10 charts) 

Good to see SplashCast on the list – haven’t heard much from them lately. Check out my thoughts on widget installation and ethics, 2008 widget predictions and all of our widget coverage.

Gigya is announcing the public launch of its "widget distribution network" today. This is great news considering that widget ads was one of my 2008 predictions. There’s no reason that advertising widgets can’t take over the ad market this year as long as they get the needed distribution. Gigya is trying to help that by allowing advertisers and brands to use their network to push out their widgets.

One of the reasons why I believe widgets are left behind is because they don’t drive as many visitors to the brand web site. This is always a big push for brands – now they are slowly starting to realize that its about brand interaction – who cares where that interaction happens.

The key for growth and acceptance lies in two areas: payout/money and analytics. The more money that’s paid out to the publishers obviously the higher acceptance there will be. But for advertisers and brands, the ability to report back to management about the effectiveness about the widgets will be key.

Kristen has some additional information taking a look at other widget ad players.

NY-based Mochila is announcing a new partnership with Gigya, the emerging widget distribution and tracking network.  Mochila will deploy Gigya’s Wildfire technology to its extensive network of buyers and sellers including content publishers of all sizes, from long-tail blogs to large media companies.

Mochila is a content mediaplace and they continue to expand their distribution network signing deals with Belo and Citizen Image over the past month. For Mochila to be successful, distribution is key and Gigya is an excellent choice as their widget partnerships run from Cnet to RockYou to Metacafe. 

“Mochila is a breakthrough syndication model for the publishing world and we’re thrilled to be able to tap into Gigya’s technology to help drive a new dynamic for the exchange of all types of content,” said Benjamin Chen, chairman and CTO of Mochila. “By partnering with Gigya, we can build upon the ways in which we help our publisher members syndicate quality content that otherwise becomes trapped and siloed. We’re equally excited that Gigya can also supply us with the opportunity to incrementally monetize this additional distribution.”

Check out my interview with the Mochila executive team and the press release on Silicon Alley Insider.

These are the hottest startups from KillerStartups for the period ending April 13, 2007.

YoName.com – Search for Anyone Across Social Network Sites

yoName allows you to search for people's social networking profiles all from one spot. You can type in the person's name, their email address, or their username and see which sites they use and then go to their profiles. So far, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Xanga, Digg, and Match have been added. You may know just someone's name, but with that you can find which networks they're using and then check out that network and reconnect. read more »

CambrianHouse.com – Home of Crowdsourcing

You've always had a great idea but don't have the human resources to start it up? Cambrian House taps the wisdom of the people and relies the success of the model based on the theory that two heads are better than one, or in this case, entire crowds are better than one. The members of the Cambrian House elect to identify their strengths, skills, interests, super powers, etc, and submit ideas and business ventures onto the site. read more »

XING.com – Powering Relationships for the World's Business Professionals

XING.com is a business social networking site that has recently merged with it's Spanish-speaking counterpart, eConozco. Xing enables its members to not only add, edit and manage their business contacts, but also facilitates new professional opportunities through networking. The now bilingual enterprise also has representation in Beijing, Zurich, and in their headquarters in Hamburg. read more »

Ganges.com – Not Just Another Video Aggregator?

Like a growing number of sites, Ganges aggregates media– in this case videos and photos– and endows their users with the power to share, collect, find and inform. Its purpose is to 'be delightful,' and impart a feeling of joy and warmth among fellow gangesers. Said gangesers will no doubt feel tickled with delight to earn up to $40,000 with their pictures or videos; should your photo/video be voted to top place, your good karma will indeed pay off. read more »

Gigya.com – Boost Content Sharing with Gigya Wildfire

Wildfire is an incredibly useful tool for social networkers and content sites alike. Wildfire forms partnerships with content sites, such as Metacafe and Bolt, and creates a widget to put on their page that allows users to add their content to their favorite networking sites with minimal effort. Instead of having to copy and paste lines of code into their profiles, which can be difficult for less advanced web users, Wildfire allows users to choose which social network they want to send the content to, what their user name and password is, and in which section they want to post the content, and then it’s done. This allows users to continue browsing content providers’ sites without changing pages to insert the code, boosting virality for the sites. Not only that, but it’s free! read more »