CBS-owned Last.fm says 3rd party web widgets hooked into its API added 19 million music users to its user base in January, in addition to the 21 million active users accessing the service through the Last.fm site itself. As a result it has launched a dedicated showcase site to highlight the best widgets and tools. The site opened to developers in 2003 but has not set up a dedicated home for them at build.last.fm. Some of the widgets that have come from this innovation include a tool that shows favourite CD covers on Wordpress blogs, a tool that graphs music preferences and one that tracks listening habits on a user’s mobile phone.
So here’s a question. Why was is it that at last night’s Mashup event on widgets on London last night, so many audience questions about widgets were along the lines of “Where’s the money?”. Was the audience just plain dumb or did the eminent list of speakers not get the information across well enough?
I noticed that plenty of ‘brand managers’ in the audience seemed to be worried about what would happen if someone put a widget containing their brand on a site which did not portray their brand in the best light. But I have to ask, what about lots of people putting the widget in the perfect place for their brand? Ever heard of the long tail? This feels like a very old and dead conversation. The people who don’t get this are seriously in trouble.
This is like the SQUA.RE situation – brand managers have spent bundles building their brands and don’t want to lose control by having it appear on some unknown long tail of half-baked blogs/sites.
Also there just isn’t enough accountability – how will the show off in their next client meeting – it would only take one instance of appearing on, say, a race-hate sight and they’d lose their job…
The world of CPC and CPA is not credible to (traditional) ad agencies and brand ‘experts’.
Fukeo – Again, I take your point, but why would a brand manager lose their job when it wasn’t them who’d put the brand on a bad site? This is my point. The users are, and expect to be, in control now. The company that doesn’t understand this is still trying to do the ‘build it and they will come’ thing. That only works for massive media sites and brands, not the vast majority put there.
Hi Mike, great post – I completely agree. I think that as a panel we did fail to really get the audience fired up about the widget opportunity last night. I must admit I was surprised by the amount of cynicism in the room, but it was our job to offer a persuasive argument and I don’t think we quite managed it, which is a shame.
You would think that examples like last.fm who have grabbed widgets by both hands would be an inspiring case study for others. I don’t think you can say, ‘hey, they’re a web 2.0 company, it’s easy for them to open up’ – the opportunity is staring EVERY big company right in the face: Look at what sources of content, data and services you have in-house and then make them easily accessible for others to remix, widgetise, whatever. That’s what I wanted people to take home from the mashup event last night. I’m sure a some people got it!
I think you underestimate most of the crowd, I think lots of people did ‘get it’, but were frankly underwhelmed by a lack of ’something new’ – widgets let face it are 10+ years old, interactive Flash ‘widgets’ have been about forever, as the guy from the BBC pointed out, what is new is inserting social interactivity into ‘widgets’ via the use of API’s – so now a widget can understand its location, it can present data in a contextual way.
The crowd was frustrated that it was presented in such a way that they were being asked to ‘believe’ in widgets and that ‘if you would just take it for granted’ that they are good that all would be good. And making statements that these things do not have obvious ROI’s is just stupidity, the internet can be tracked, and if people are putting up widgets without the correct tracking infrastructure that then proves the location / time / demographic / (did it get used) then they are idiots.
So blaming it on ’stupid audience’ is wrong, they got it, they wanted as so many people said to me ’some meat’, for instance 30 minute presentation of real data on a few select widgets and how they performed. Someone gave an example of Ryan-air spending 25k and got 90k installs. So what? did that result in them buying flights, how quickly did they uninstall it? without these sorts of metrics then the biz people are just going to ignore this.
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Hi nick, it was good talking to you at the event last night. I understand the frustration with not having concrete case studies backed up by numbers. The last.fm example was the closest I had, and that was only because Mr Butcher kindly sent me the press release earlier in the day! Perhaps a good format for a future event would be to include some folks from the client-side (the panel last night were all agency/supply-side) who could run through some success stories, with metrics, in short 5-10 min presentations. It’s not often that us folks on the agency side have permission to divulge a client’s numbers. Thx for the feedback, I’m sure the organisers will be reading this and taking it into account.
I was at the event. I enjoyed it and will be at all of the future planned events.
In general, the crowd was very knowledgeable in the subject area. “Plain dumb” is completely unfair.
The panel started with the statement that the website was dead and then proceeded to name check Facebook and Bebo in every sentence as if, without these destinations, widgets wouldn’t exist.
I don’t remember one example the panel gave of a widget that had made money or had been sustainable. In fact it was the crowd that brought up the examples listed above.
To reiterate Tom’s point the panel were not in the business of making commercial widgets and their revenues were not directly tied to the commercial success of widgets.
Widgets look very much like search before Google. What we all wanted to discuss was what the commercial pathway was.
Mike,
I was also a bit surprised by the attitude of some attendees, but at least they’d gone to a widget event to try and find out! I’m more worried for any brand managers who took one look at the title and thought ‘widgets sound like they’re just for kids’…
As long as they are open-minded, then starting to find out about the opportunities by asking ‘where’s the money?’ could be quite helpful. They found out that things aren’t so simple these days…
Just to be clear, we are very much in the business of producing commercial widgets, albeit for clients rather than ourselves. Because of this we just can’t always disclose the details, which is annoying.
Last.FM rocks – we’ll soon be integrating their widget, as it’ll let you know what songs are best to wake up your friends to!