It’s been quite a busy week for widget companies. RockYou kicked things off by announcing its $35 million Series C round on Monday. KickApps and Clearspring partnered to bolster their respective widget efforts on Tuesday. And now Widgetbucks is announcing that it has raised an additional $10 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Ignition Partners.
The Series B round brings Widgetbucks’ total to just under $20 million (the first institutional funding came from Ignition alone in February 2007).
Widgetbucks claims to have reached 100 million unique visitors in May through its advertising network (the widgets it serves are essentially interactive advertisements intended to deliver higher yields than traditional banner ads). ComScore’s numbers struggle to line up – they show only 10 million uniques for Widgetbucks in March, although that alone placed the company among other top niche networks like Snap Shots and AdOn, all of which appear to have been discounted.
Dean Jutilla, director of marketing for Widgetbucks, says the discrepancy is due to differences in the way ComScore and Widgetbucks tracked impressions. Widgetbucks pulled its data from its CDM Akamai and tracked visitors globally, while ComScore looked only at US numbers.