Will and I had a lovely chat with Lawrence Coburn, author of SexyWidget and Founder of RateItAll the other day, and  he posted about Widgetbox soon thereafter. Lawrence reviewed us right after we launched publicly at DEMOFall 2006, and while we’ve chatted here and there since then, we haven’t done a good deep dive with him into our company and the widget space at large in quite some time.  It was fun to catch up with him; I really like the SexyWidget blog, and find Lawrence’s posts to be very smart and objective, and he always raises good thought provoking questions. 

The widget world is a super interesting one, not just because of its incredible adoption rates (62% of worldwide internet users engaged with a widget in April 2008 according to comScore!), and fast moving space as everyone races to figure out distribution, Facebook, OpenSocial, etc., but also because now it has been around long enough that companies are starting to specialize and find their niches.  Lawrence comments early in his post about Widgetbox that he’s "never really understood where exactly they fit into the widget ecosystem, as they seem to do a bit of everything."  He’s totally right.  Up until very recently, we did do a bit of everything.  Widgetbox was the first, and is now the largest, consumer facing widget community, and when we started back in the spring of ‘06 – before most people had ever heard of a widget – we had to do a bit of everything in order to be successful.

Will often quotes Adam Smith in saying that specialization is a function of market size.  This could not be more true. We are finally starting to see specialization in the widget space, as the market is now large enough for niches to exist successfully.  This is great news for widget companies and widget users alike, not to mention those who are looking to spend marketing and advertising dollars on widgets.  Many of these poor folk have been incredibly confused about who does what, and those of us who live and breathe widgets haven’t been the most helpful to them in terms of figuring that out, mostly because we have been figuring it out as well!

We see the market now starting to segment into 4 areas.  Lawrence outlines those in his post as well:

The Widget Publishers – these are the hit makers, the Slides and the RockYous of the world who are out to develop their own hit widgets and apps, and run ads across the top.

The White Label Platforms – the big players here are Clearspring and Gigya.  As Price describes them, these are the infrastructure players – the guys providing white label tools to big publishers.

The Publishing Tools – This is a newish category of players that I’ve noted as one of my areas to watch – companies like SproutBuilder, Gydget, and the newly launched iWidgets.  These are the folks who are building tools that allow enterprises and individuals build and publish their own widgets.

So where does Widgetbox fit into this? Price considers Widgetbox a
branded widget promotion / launch network (Nabbr also falls into this
category) with a couple of key assets. First and foremost is the
Widgetbox gallery, which I’ve long considered the finest in the biz.
Price made a point of stressing the SEO power of his gallery – a widget
that is included in the gallery will often show up first for its
keyword on Google within 24 hours.

(Actually, we generally see Widgetbox show up first in search results within minutes). 

What this means is that there is a clear definition for where Widgetbox sits in the widget value chain.  We have the footprint through our community created content that allows for incredible targeted distribution through widgets.   The 70K+ widgets created by our community now sit on over 860K domains around the internet.  We count MySpace and Facebook as one domain each.  This is a huge footprint that slices evenly across every demographic and geography imaginable that allows us to connect advertisers and widget creators with targeted audiences and websites.  We can do this through multiple levers – our own site, our affiliate partner networks (galleries we power, accelerators, etc.), and what we call "in the wild."  It’s pretty exciting really.

Lawrence also raises some great questions about whether these "bright lines" really exist as we see them.  This is totally valid.  We think they do, and we take it on ourselves to prove it.  There’s lots coming down the pike that will help validate this, so stay tuned.

So get out there and build your widgets anywhere and bring them to us – we will help get them out into that wild, wild web.  It’s a jungle out there, so don’t try to go it alone!