Who should get to keep the lion’s share of any money earned from the widgets that are suddenly springing up all over the Web?

"That is the multi-billion dollar question," agrees Max Levchin, whose Slide.com has just been accorded the status of Number 1 widget site by comScore.

There may not be that much money at stake just yet, but the advertising dollars will surely follow as distributed media consumption becomes a wider habit.

Advertisers have every reason to turn to widgets as a new way to reach a dispersed audience across the Web. As Levchin says, "they have massive reach and a high level of engagement." From nothing 16 months ago, Slide now reaches an audience of 117m through its widgets, according to comScore (this is based on the number of internet users who at least once a month view a Webpage with a Slide widget embedded in it.) Many widgets are Flash-based "rich media" applications that cry out for attention. Eventually, says Levchin, they are a natural vehicle for ecommerce: there is no reason a check-out function couldn’t be embedded in a widget (view a clip of a new movie, then click on a button that says "Charge this to my iTunes account.")

So how will the cash be split between these rich media interlopers and the sites that play host? MySpace’s none-too-subtle move to block Photobucket a couple of months ago was a clear indication that the stakes here are high. Perhaps that was one reason for Facebook’s recent decision to open itself up fully to the widget-makers: it could steal an early lead in the race to attract Web developers as social networking sites evolve into broader online platforms.

Levchin predicts that two or three precedent-setting deals will eventually lay the groundrules for this new economy. His suggestion: pretty much an even split of the proceeds between widget-maker and host. As MySpace’s graphic demonstration showed, though, the sites that own the eyeballs may think they deserve a bigger cut than that.

June 18th, 2007 in Uncategorised | Permalink