More on widgets - Content or Function?
Posted on January 27, 2008 by Martin Zagorsek
Most creators of widgets have focused from the beginning on utility - in order for a lot of people to put (and keep) a widget on their site, it has to contain something useful. The obvious stuff includes weather, news headlines, stock market info.. sure there are plenty of novelty widgets out there, but I suspect a lot of people who do install them end up removing them once the novelty wears off.
Not that short-term novelty content is a bad thing, but it’s hard to build a business on. I recently came across a different approach, on a food-related site called Nutrition Data. Given that they’re owned by Conde Nast you can safely assume they’re interested in having a solid business model. What makes ND’s widget interesting is that it offers functionality and not just content.
The ND widget allows users to look up the nutritional specs on various types of food. It pops up a separate window for the search results, so as not to annoy host sites by redirecting their user traffic. The popped-up window is on their main site, so they get the pageviews and ad revenues from that point on.NutritionData is a pure media property, their only income is from ads, so the widget is definitely a traffic play. But what they’re doing is offering functional utility in order to draw traffic in, rather than pushing their content out through their widget. It’ll be interesting to see how much of this creeps into the rest of the widgetsphere, stay tuned.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Content Driven Commerce
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