Today, LinkShare and Widgetbox announced a new partnership to enable LinkShare affiliates to create custom, distributable money-making widgets that display products from their merchant partners. The new “ad widgets” will allow LinkShare users to drive revenue on advertisers’ sites by combining the richness of LinkShare’s product inventory with Widgetbox’s market-leading widget service.

The LinkShare widgets display targeted products from single or multiple advertisers, giving publishers the hottest and most valuable products in a single widget. The widgets are dynamically updated and feature the freshest, most popular products. Other custom features include: multiple tabs of product content, multiple product display modes, custom sizing and custom styles. The widgets are easily embedded onto websites, blogs, and social media sites – including Facebook.

“Performance-based marketing programs offer retailers a chance to reach new audiences of online shoppers,” said Jonathan Levine, co-president, LinkShare. “We are constantly looking for innovative, user-friendly ways to help members of our network achieve this goal. LinkShare’s partnership with Widgetbox allows us to offer our network of affiliates an easy, valuable tool that will help them engage consumers.”

LinkShare recently unveiled the company’s new mantra of “easy, fast, open” – its commitment to offering technologies that are easy-to-use, fast-to-market, and open across channels at its Symposium East 2009. At the event, the company also spotlighted its new Bento Box, which offers an assortment of applications and tools, including those built by third parties, that integrate LinkShare Web Services. The Widgetbox ad unit is the newest application to join the Bento Box.

“Our fully customizable widget ad unit is a valuable complement to LinkShare’s expansive network of affiliates and advertisers. Through the use of our tools, LinkShare affiliates will be able to add dynamic, customized product ads to their websites, blogs and social profiles – a proven way to achieve higher engagements with consumers. Simply put, this means higher conversions and more revenue for affiliates,” said Steve Klopf, VP of Revenue, Widgetbox. “We are very excited about our new partnership with LinkShare.”

Widgetbox looks forward to working with LinkShare to help redefine the nature of “ads,” moving them from static banners to distributed content modules that drive higher click-through-rates for advertisers and higher revenue for publishers.

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