Aggregation is so 2006. The new web is all about distributed media, and widgets are the new web’s wunderkind. With widgets, users can easily remix, repost, and share chunked content, making them a popular (and rapidly growing) marketing tool. According to ComScore, more than 48% of all US internet users – over 87 million people – now use web widgets. And that includes publishers. Matt Shatz, VP Digital at Random House, announced at the recent AAR panel that RH now has 600,000 web widgets on 2,000 sites, for a total of 8,000,000 pages views.
But, you might ask, who are these 87 million people? Where are these 600,000 widgets? What is a web widget anyhow?
Widgets (aka gadgets, badges, modules, capsules, snippets, minis, and flakes) are portable chunks of code that can be easily embedded on various websites, blogs, and profile pages without any extra coding. On the user end, that translates into little windows of syndicated content. Your Trip Advisor “Places I’ve Been” app on Facebook? Widget. Your number-of-days-until-Bush-is-out-of-office desktop badge? Widget. The Flickr feed on your friend’s blog? Widget.
“The widget market is in its infancy,” Carolyn Pittis, HarperCollins’s SVP Global Marketing Strategy & Operations said. “We set out to experiment, to see what happens, to see usage, to see what types of consumers widgets attract.” For publishers, widgets are a way to begin to regain control over their digital space in the age of Google and Amazon search-inside dominance. Emboldened by that control (limiting page previews, specifying search inside capabilities), pubs are finally warming up to what’s really important: expansive online distribution. “Our priority is syndicating our content as broadly as possible,” Shatz said. And because widgets are so easy to post and share – creators provide code which users easily cut and paste – widgets are the perfect syndication vehicle.
In addition to RH’s Insight widget program, both HC (“Browse Inside”) and Bloomsbury (“Search Inside”) have title-based widget programs with almost identical functionality (both are powered by LibreDigital). Harper was LibreDigital’s first partner, and Pittis said that HC has prototyped a variety of digital functions and apps with them that other publishers have gone on to use. HC currently has two widget templates available–the LibreDigital “sampling” widget that allows readers to browse inside books, and the SpringWidgets “countdown” widget that allows fans to countdown the days until a book is in the marketplace.
Publishing widgets across the board share some similar features (cover image, TOC, sample pages), although RH’s widgets have received immeasurably better press due to their increased functionality, usability and customizable features. For example, the RH widget comes in two sizes, and pages can both be browsed within the viewer, and within a larger pop-up widget (the HC and Bloomsbury widgets always launch in a separate window). RH also has a search function, and a customizable “buy” button link. “From the moment we launched, anyone could easily reconfigure the buy button on our widgets,” Shatz said. “The day after we launched , all of the retailers in the Booksense program had all of our widgets with the buy button bound for their respective carts.”
Still, there are RH compatibility issues–unlike HC’s widget, RH widgets still aren’t compatible with MySpace, and some bloggers have cited difficulty embedding the larger sized widgets.
Although Harper doesn’t track widget usage on 3rd party sites, Pittis said that about 1,000 widgets/day are being browsed on the HC site, and that on average the widgets are getting up to 10-15 pageviews/unique user – “a pretty sticky number that we are pleased with,” she said. (HC doesn’t break out how many users have gone on to embed those widgets elsewhere.) At last count, HC had a global total of 12,000 widgets, with every title in their digital warehouse available automatically as a viral widget on the HC site.
Shatz said that RH doesn’t capture any personally identifiable information about widget embedders beyond their URL, and that viewers, likewise, remain entirely anonymous. “We monitor traffic in the aggregate and can tell which widgets are generating interest and views, both at a site- and book-level,” he said.
Other publishers in the process of launching title-based widgets include Hachette which will soft launch its OpenBook widget the first week of November. According to Jim Bean, Head of OpenBook, Hachette is starting with a small number of titles on the HBGUSA website in order to “learn and discover the different possibilities that come with a viral marketing tool.” Hachette plans on rolling out a larger number of titles on its new website early next year.
Simon & Schuster has partnered with Innodata to digitize their backlist and with TurnHere to produce their book video channel, and create their widget player. In addition to making the widgets available from the S&S site, TurnHere distributes BookVideos.tv content to numerous book-centric sites including Book Divas, Goodreads, Lib.rario.us, and LibraryThing, as well as to major Web portals including AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and YouTube.
Last May, Michael Cader launched a Job Board widget to show industry readers how simple it was to set one up. “As our experiments go, the Job Board widget has been a very modest one,” he said. “But it was also really easy – which is a big part of what we wanted to demonstrate to others in the community!” Although he says that he’s not monitoring the stats closely, Cader estimates that about 200 people/sites have displayed the Job Board widget at some point since they introduced it, garnering about 2,500 pageviews a week.
The next stage of the publisher widget will most likely include increased functionality (more extensive search capabilities, compatibility with all social networking sites, buy buttons), as well as a further degree of customization (similar to the recently introduced Amazon suite of widgets which allow users themselves to become the widget creators and assemble Amazon content).
Pittis emphasized that since the HC widget launched in February, the marketplace has evolved rapidly – she specifically cited Facebook opening up to the public as a key advancement since the Facebook apps are some of the most heavily trafficked widgets on the web. “We need to put into the hands of consumers things they will be eager to pass onto their friends. Our first widget was a no brainer – search inside – but now there are a huge number of different riffs on that. We’re very connected in watching what’s happening and planning our next move. It’s still early going.”
