Userplane, a communications widget provider that allows website owners to add chat, instant messaging, and video conferencing to their sites, has launched a revenue sharing program called Userplane Money. The company, which was purchased by AOL in August 2006, has deployed widgets on over 155,000 websites including Friendster, MySpace, and date.com. The free version of Userplane’s platform, which is ad-supported, will now allow publishers to make money from those ads.
Userplane says they are seeing an adoption rate of about 5,000 news widgets being deployed per week, and they are hoping that this new business model shift (from paid products to ad-supported products to rev share) will fuel future growth. “WeÄôre counting on Userplane Money to explode our base into the millions, because weÄôre telling publishers, ‘Hey, you can make money off of this,'” said Userplane CEO Mike Jones.
Marcien Jenckes, SVP of Messaging and Social Media at AOL, puts a lot of stock in widget advertising. “Widget distribution [is] the next big thing in site monetization,” he said. And indeed widgets have been in the news a lot recently. Facebook is staking their future on widgets being able to drive the monetization and growth of their company. CBS recently partnered with a slew of widget companies in the hopes that widgets will be able to spread their content. Newsweek even declared this the “Year of the Widget” saying that widgets are “music to advertisersÄô ears.”
Sharing revenue with the long tail is probably a good idea. Allowing smaller publishers to profit from the proliferation of widgets should help Userplane carve out a more significant portion of the market for their particular offerings. What do you think? Will widget marketing be big in 2007? Will revenue sharing help Userplane grow?
Disclosure: Userplane is a Read/WriteWeb sponsor.
