Getting the Facebook Crowd to Spread Your Widgets

eMarketer: For those who aren't familiar with Gigya, what does it do?

Liza Hausman: We have a platform for sharing widgets and tracking their use. It makes it easy to grab a piece of content and put it on your social network profile page, blog, Webpage or desktop.

The product initially appealed to widget developers, social networking sites and other content developers. JibJab is a good example of the type of company that wanted to make it easy for people who found their site to grab content and not have to figure out where to paste code on a Webpage.

eMarketer: How does it work?

Ms. Hausman: Clients use our platform to make their widgets easier to share and track. They can also become a publisher in our distribution network.

When Internet users install a widget that uses our platform, they can customize their widget or find something they want to post on their social network profile. We also ask if they would also like a widget from another advertiser in our network.

We guarantee advertisers will get a meaningful number of installs for their widgets—hundreds of thousands in a span of several weeks. We charge anywhere from $0.50 to $2 depending on how successful the widget is and other factors.

This solves a couple of problems for advertisers. One, you don't know if a widget will have a large number of installs until you release it. Second, even if it does go viral, it's an exponential growth curve. The larger the starting base, the greater the growth. Most advertisers are not willing to wait two years for a widget to become a hit.

eMarketer: What are some of the most innovative widget uses you've seen?

Ms. Hausman: Unilever is a good one. They came out with a new line of Dove products called "go fresh."

They invested their money creating a whole microseries with Alicia Keys, which ran during "The Hills." They had us create and distribute a widget with the same series in it, so that if "Hills" viewers missed part of the microseries, wanted to see it again or share it with a friend, they could.

It was a matter of sharing and building some other elements into the widget. So they had a chat room. We distributed the widget upfront and each week we could publish a new video into it, which you couldn't do if you were just sharing an individual video through YouTube. So we actually put calls to action that said, "Just updated: Video three is here." They could also have had an exclusive episode in there.

eMarketer: How do you think publishers' and advertisers' use of widgets will develop in the next few years?

Ms. Hausman: I think you'll see greater adoption and creativity, experimentation and measurement.

In the not-too-distant future, widgets will be able to tap into your friends on social networks in the same way that Facebook applications do now.

We also believe aggregators will continue to play an important role because standards are not anywhere on the horizon. Even though social networks are opening their software to outside developers, there are no incentives to use a single standard that would work across all social networks.