Site owners, administrators, web business owners, content producers, and everyone in between are always trying to find the best ways to encourage visitors to spend more time on their sites. It’s hard enough getting people there in the first place, but keeping visitors and customers on the site (and engaged) once there? No walk in the park. But doing so is critical — Just ask Groupon.
As one might expect, there are a thousand ways to increase engagement, and there’s obviously been a lot of noise around social as a great facilitator of a stickier (and more enjoyable) user experiences for websites, apps, and businesses. Thanks to some research (and a nifty infographic) from Gigya, the makers of SaaS technology (or a social CRM platform, if you will) that helps businesses make their websites social, we now have further proof that one of the best ways to encourage repeat visitors is through social logins. → Read More
Many companies have begun to realize that social is not just a new channel or a new fad, it’s a new way of doing business. But learning the ropes, how to use social networks and social channels, and optimize and tailor social features for one’s business, is easier said than done. This is where Gigya enters the equation. The startup offers a SaaS technology (or a social CRM platform, if you will) to help businesses make their websites social, integrating their online appendages with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and consolidating the best social features and widgets into one solution.
While the startup has made a play into social commerce with widgets to integrate e-Commerce platforms with social networks, etc., Gigya is today announcing the launch of an important (and perhaps somewhat intimidating) new technology that has big data implications. Social data implications, of course. The tech has been dubbed the “Identity Management Platform”, and essentially, it enables businesses to better manage user data by providing them with complete, permission-based access to a user’s social, profile, and behavior data culled from activity on their websites. → Read More
Eyal Magen, founder of social sharing software maker Gigya, a couple of weeks ago announced that Dave Yovanno, who joined the company as chief executive officer in October 2008 after serving as COO of ValueClick for almost a decade, was stepping down.
Turns out Yovanno will be returning to ValueClick as the new general manager of Mediaplex, the company’s technology division.
Yovanno will report to ValueClick CEO Jim Zarley and will assist with the company’s corporate development program in addition to running Mediaplex. → Read More
ShareThis, which you may be familiar with thanks to all the buttons online publishers worldwide have been plastering on their sites to lure you into spreading their content, is now live at roughly 1 million websites, aggregately reaching more than 400 million users.
The company has now tapped Kristen Fergason, formerly a marketer at Yahoo, as its new CMO to grow even more. In addition to her hiring, ShareThis has named Julie Greenhouse SVP Ad Sales & Business Development and Ben Slutter VP of Revenue and Ad Operations. Both were with the company previously. → Read More
If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.
To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down: → Read More
Many of the widgets scattered across the Web are made in Flash, but Adobe doesn’t participate in the widget economy. Today, it is taking a first tentative step towards changing that with the release of a new Distribution Manager for widgets created on the Flash Platform. In addition to making it easier for people to share the widgets across 70 Web and mobile destinations, it will track their usage, and serve as a widget ad network as well.
Adobe is obviously interested in getting into the advertising end of the business, which is why it recently announced it is acquiring Omniture for $1.8 billion. Rather than just getting paid once for the tools to create Web apps and content, it wants to get a piece of those recurring advertising dollars too. The widget distribution play is along the same lines, except that for now Adobe is doing it through a partnership with Gigya, the widget distribution and advertising network. What that means is that any money Adobe makes will be split more ways, but in return it achieves faster entry into the market. → Read More
Gigya, the Israeli startup that helps other companies easily distribute their widgets, has released some of its latest figures on the recent holiday season.
Most notable: December 23rd set the new record for total number of widget installs in a single day, with 900,000 widgets installed across all of the service’s supported blogs and social networks. Gigya obviously doesn’t account for every widget on the web, but it does help distribute content from a wide array of partners including Electronic Arts, RockYou, MTV, and Sony BMG (you can see a full list of partners here).
Through its Wildfire service, Gigya allows content providers and widget developers to easily syndicate their content to a variety of places online, including many popular social networks, blog platforms, and customized homepages like Pageflakes. Users typically only need to enter their login credentials, and the widget will be automatically inserted into their profiles (as opposed to manually copy and pasting an embed code). → Read More
MyBefia is a great little site to compare Apple iPhone applications based on their rankings in the App Store. Add up to three applications (the only annoying thing is you have to look up its iTunes Store URL) and see how rank has changed over time. It also shows estimated market share, review rankings over time and popularity. The widgets are embeddable via Gigya. → Read More
Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C round led by DAG Ventures and joined by all existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, First Round Capital, and Mayfield Fund. The round brings the Israeli startup’s total funding to about $23.5M, an amount raised over the two plus years since its founding in summer 2006.
The money will fuel two main widget services: Wildfire, which helps widget makers distribute their wares, and Socialize, a Google Friend connect competitor that adds social networking features to any website. → Read More
Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over just who will ultimately control the aggregated data – if anyone. So it may or may not come as a surprise that Gigya, a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix by launching a service into public beta called Gigya Socialize. I first heard of Gigya’s plans to invert social networking in February when it was called “Wildfire Social”. President Rooly Eliezerov described it then as “better than anything we’ve done so far”. He even conjectured that whoever owned the aggregated social graph could become the next Google…which is ironic in hindsight, of course, given that Google itself beat Gigya to the punch. Regardless, Eliezerov insists that the announcement of Google Friend Connect doesn’t change Gigya’s strategy, and that Gigya Socialize is actually quite different in some ways. He points to two areas in particular: the availability of an API for seamless integration, and the ability to import friends from email contact lists. Gigya Socialize can be implemented by websites in either of two ways. They can drop in a set of plug-n-play components, like a news feed or sharing panel, that are based in Flash and visually configurable. Or they can work with an API that provides a short list of commands for retrieving and saving user activity and friend data. While currently you can only import friends from Gtalk, Orkut and (soon) Hi5 with Google Friend Connect, you can invite them from your list of contacts on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL with Gigya Socialize. Gigya intends to keep a low profile with this social service. Branding on individual components is kept to a minimum, and users are only brought back to Gigya’s site for account management purposes. The Palo Alto-based startup has no plans to aggregate friend activity across participating sites in one FriendFeed-like hub. As for monetization, Gigya is thinking about releasing support for inserting sponsored items into the news feeds of participating publishers’ sites. The idea is that advertisers would be able to broadcast their own users’ behavior elsewhere on the web as → Read More
Spottt, which went into private beta at TechCrunch40, launches to the public today. The product is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand. It is a reincarnation of sorts of LinkExchange, an advertising network that launched in the mid nineties and was later acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. LinkExchange co-founder Tony Hsieh (also the CEO of Zappos) is advising Adbrite on Spottt. The basic idea is that you place the Spottt 125×125 ad unit on your site, above the fold (no adult content). They provide a simple embed code, or you can use your own ad serving software (we use OpenAds). For every two ad impressions that you serve, you’ll get one free ad somewhere on the network (you can see the ad unit here on TechCrunch, we’ve added it into the sponsor’s area to the right to test it), and it is also on CrunchBase. That leaves Spottt with 50% of the ad inventory for itself. For the first year they’ll just place their own ads on sites. After a year they’ll add the extra inventory to Adbrite and let advertisers purchase it. This isn’t for everyone, of course. Sites that can sell ads will want to do so to make the money. But Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan notes that there are millions of websites that cannot afford to advertise, and this gives them a way of doing so without paying. And even sites that have advertising units on their site may want to add this to get some inventory on other sites. “I think this is the coolest thing we’ve ever built,” he said. Spottt is also providing real time statistics for users, including the number of ads you’ve shown, the number you’ve received (half of that) and the number of clicks on both ads you are showing and those you are receiving. Click on the image for a larger view of sample stats. Spottt is run from Amazon’s EC2 web service, and advertising images are hosted on Akamai (Kaplan says he wants to be able to scale quickly in the event it grows anything like LinkExchange did back in the day). They are also working with Gigya to enable the placement of the ad unit on MySpace and other social networks. If ads aren’t accepted on any particular social network, he says, they’ll just run their house → Read More
Widget distribution company Gigya has publicly launched a distribution service for branded widgets, a premium service for advertisers that complements WildFire, its free service for the distribution of non-branded widgets. As <a href="we described last April, WildFire helps to distribute widgets across the web by making it easy for users to install them on their social network profiles and blogs. Provide WildFire with your MySpace credentials, for example, and the service will install a widget onto your profile page, cutting out the cumbersome steps needed to install it manually. Since Gigya has provided Wildfire as a free service for both users and widget providers, it has had to come up with a separate service to generate revenue. Gigya has opted not to incorporate advertisements into widgets, but rather to push branded widgets (think: widgets as advertisements) through its WildFire service. When WildFire users install regular, non-branded widgets on their profile pages, they will sometimes be offered branded widgets as they wait for their selected widget to install. Advertisers pay a “cost per install” that ranges between $2-5 every time a user decides to install a branded widget in addition to their original selection. The CPI is justified by the number of impressions the widget receives once spread virally over the internet. Advertisers can track the distribution of their branded widgets with the same sort of analytic tools as provided with WildFire. They can view the number of installs and impressions (how many and where on the web), see where in the world the impressions are being made, and distinguish between original widget installations and those that have spread virally. Gigya expects to partner with advertisers who are willing to make an investment of at least $5-10k in widget distribution. Sony BMG’s Jive Records, Kimberly-Clark and Disney have already opted to spread their branded widgets through Gigya’s distribution network, which has been running privately for a couple months. The company says that it distributes more than 300,000 widgets per day from over 400 widget production sites. Gigya competitor Clearspring also distributes branded widgets but not in the same way as Gigya. Whereas branded widgets are suggested to users after they have installed non-branded widgets with Gigya, branded widgets are distributed as IAB standard advertisements with Clearspring. Clearspring also allows advertisers to embed their messages as “in-widget” ads. CrunchBase Information Gigya Clearspring Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been around (it appears to have launched late this Fall), but we recently came across a simple widget service with no press coverage to date called Hyplet that helps you create digital business cards and flyers. You can spread them around the web by embedding in blogs, social networks, websites, and emails. Hyplet’s end product is nothing fancy, just a simple HTML snippet that references an image hosted on the company’s servers. Most of the service’s value comes from its user-friendly image creation tool that lets you arrange text and images, pick styles, and add links from within the browser. It’s obviously targeted at people with little or no knowledge of Photoshop or similar graphics programs. While Hyplet has templates for both business cards and flyers, you can modify them and add your own images to create widgets for any purpose. I can see individual MySpace users taking advantage of Hyplet to put flyers on each other’s profiles, but I can’t see the service being used for serious viral campaigns. The themes are too limited and the publishing options require you to manually add your widgets in one place at a time (there’s no help from widget distribution services like Gigya or ClearSpring here). There’s also the issue of monetization; Hyplet doesn’t appear to have any source of revenue yet so I’d be concerned that my hosted images wouldn’t be around in the future. It’s also really easy to take out the part of the HTML that promotes Hyplet itself, which I did to the business card above so it could be floated to the left (and no, that’s not my real contact information). Get your own Hyplet! → Read More
For developers designing for the other 99.9 percent of the web not running solely on Facebook, Gigya offers Wildfire, a simple interface for spreading, tracking, and monetizing your widget across 12 social sites. They’ve been chosen to handle distribution and tracking for 6 of the top 10 Widget properties (RockYou!, PictureTrail, BunnyHeroLabs, BlingyBlob.com, POQbum and Projectplaylist.com), as categorized by ComScore’s Widget Metrix. Combined, the 6 partners have a total audience of 193 million unique visitors. Gigya’s “embed this” widget is a simple tabbed menu of social sites that lets anyone post your embed code to their page by just entering their credentials. It even works with Facebook applications. You can see the full list of partners here. It’s a distinctly different strategy than what other widget tool startups are doing. We reported on another company, ClearSpring, which similarly helped developers track and spread their application. However, in contrast to Gigya, ClearSpring is open to any developer and focuses on widgetizing content, not easily posting them to social sites. Gigya is aimed at enabling large widget publishers low friction adoption on social sites. Gigya recently closed a round of funding with Benchmark and First Round Capital $2.4 million on June 25th. → Read More
Getting a widget onto a website, whether its a blog or a MySpace page or anything else, is a bit of a pain. Users generally have to copy an embed code, log into their website, and paste it into the appropriate place. While that hasn’t proven to be an insurmountable obstacle, widget startups that have found ways to make it easier for users to add widgets to their sites have seen significantly higher growth rates v. their competitors. Slide, RockYou and Photobucket were early experimenters in this space. Instead of forcing users to do the cut and paste, they simply asked them to input their MySpace (or other social network) credentials and then put the widget onto the site directly, on their behalf. When they first started doing this in 2006 everyone expected MySpace to cut them off for security reasons, but that never happened. MySpace let the companies log in as users and publish the widgets. Slide, RockYou and Photobucket saw growth explode. Competitor FilmLoop, who chose not to offer this feature, stagnated and is now in the DeadPool. But offering this feature is a bit of a hassle. There are a number of large social networks to deal with, and they occasionally change their APIs or login procedures. When that happens, the feature breaks until changes are made. So most widget companies today simply stick to the tried and true “cut and paste” approach to widget proliferation. Enter Gigya, an Israeli startup that launched a tool in November 2006 that allows people to email widgets to others instead of just posting them on websites. Their initial product is doing well, they say. And now they are launching a new product called Wildfire that will allow widget producers to directly embed their widgets into the bigger social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Xanga, Blogger and Tagworld are currently supported). There is a do-it-yourself option for small widget startups, and they are working directly with some of the larger ones. Once Wildfire is implemented with a partner widget site, users simply select the social network they use, type in their credentials and the area of the site they want it to appear, and hit submit. The widget will then be placed on their MySpace or other social network page. I’ve embedded a very high level overview video of the service below. Snapvine and Bolt/GoFish have already integrated Wildfire into their → Read More
