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 once there? No walk in the park. Just ask Groupon.

Again, sites can live or die based on engagement. And 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. Approaches to making sites and apps more “social” vary — whether it’s by focusing on creating more sharable content, adding comment sections, forums, etc., or by adding re-tweet buttons, “like”, or share buttons, etc. to encourage visitors to share on their social networks of choice.

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.

As it has proliferated across the Web, Facebook Connect has been able to let people carry their social graphs with them wherever they go. Now, thanks to Facebook, my friends are no longer confined to the social network, they’re in my movie recommendations, check-ins, and everywhere else. In some ways, it’s pretty invasive, and in most other ways, it makes our experiences better. Take friendsourced recommendations.

As Gigya’s data shows, site owners that incorporate Facebook Connect, Twitter sign in, etc. stand to benefit: Users spend 50 percent more time on sites when they’re logging in through social networks – that’s four more minutes with a social login than with a standard login. Gigya’s data considered the Web, mobile web, and apps.

This is true of page views, too. Users logged in with a social network view twice the amount of pages. Naturally, it seems to follow that when a person logs into a site through their social network, they want to interact with the site with their social graph in tow – and, according to Gigya – is in turn acting as a gateway for user engagement through comments, sharing, game mechanics, and activity feeds.

Want to leave a comment? Sign in through your social network. TechCrunch commenters might be familiar with this one.

And with 800 million users, it’s not surprising that Facebook is the most popular provider or source of social logins, at 61 percent, followed by Yahoo at 15 percent, Google at 12 percent, Twitter at 10 percent, and LinkedIn at 2 percent. While second place is distributed, it does show that there’s probably some worth in providing more than a Facebook login option, though you’ll obviously reach the majority of users that way.

In terms of social plugins, users who interact with commenting systems generally spend the most amount of time on the site, with the same holding true for page views. So, add a comment section. You may come to regret it, but the numbers don’t lie, it increases the amount of time people spend on your site. Second? Newsfeed.

But, without further ado, I’ll let Gigya take it from here. For more, check out Gigya’s blog post here.

Infographic below:

Excerpt image from Kokomedia

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 into one solution.

To date, the startup supports more than 280 million users each month across more than 500,000 sites, with customers that include names like CBS, Fox Sports, Intuit, The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, and Turner Networks, to name a few.

Gigya is big on social widgets and plug-ins, offering businesses the best of both in an effort to increase social registrations to get that much-coveted social graph info on users and customers and make it easier for them to sign up from their favorite social platforms, word-of-mouth marketing, community interaction and engagement — all that good stuff. It may sound like industry jargon, but leveraging this kind of optimized social functionality can be a boon for businesses, increasing the sharing of a business’ content or brand reach on platforms where, let’s be honest, half of the world is now interacting.

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.

What sets the Identity Management Platform apart from other user management systems is that it combines both social data and on-site activity data (like commenting and sharing). The point is to help businesses solve a big hangup inherent to data collection/management, being that many big businesses struggle to keep their customer registration up to date. Most often, they have to rely on the registration info provided by customers during their initial sign up, which tends to change with the tides.

Otherwise, businesses might be forced to go out and purchase customer data from third parties, which can be expensive, often lacks interest graph info, and just, well, puts a bad taste in your mouth. As a customer, you might be thankful that your interest graph info isn’t included in the third party-packaged identity info (that’s yours) being bought and sold, but for businesses this represents a customer targeting, retention, and service goldmine. And, let’s be honest, this is the norm.

By putting social and on-site activity data in the cloud, Gigya allows its clients to access their visitors’ up-to-date social data, leveraging it through email marketing campaigns, content recommendations, and even segmentation for hyper-relevant ad targeting.

Importantly, users are authorizing sites to access their social/behavior graph data when they authenticate (with their social identities) when they register or login through Gigya’s social plugins that are integrated onto the business’ site. Again, potentially scary for users, but a huge time and money saver for big retailers, media companies, etc. The new platform also offers a cloud-based user registration system so that sites can maintain a unified user database across a network of sites by way of single sign-on for both social and traditional authentication.

The Identity Management Platform is also integrated with Gigya’s suite of social plugins, including social login, ratings and reviews, comments, sharing, and game mechanics, so that clients can target their users all the more efficiently. For example, using the platform, marketers can easily create a list of all users who have a college degree, like travelling, and are socially influential.

Obviously, the social web provides businesses with the opportunity to understand their customers in more granular and focused ways, and by allowing these clients to access (and map) their users’ social data in the cloud, this has the potential to have a high value proposition for brands and their team of marketers. So look out, these teams are now becoming armed with realtime social data and tools that facilitate the personalization of ads and content, and soon they’ll know how to use it — and know who you are. Always?

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.

Before joining Gigya as CEO, Yovanno was a key member of the ValueClick management team from 2000 to 2008, serving as chief operating officer of U.S. media and the general manager of ValueClick Media.

He has also served on the board of directors of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and holds both bachelors and masters degrees from The George Washington University, Washington, DC.

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.

ShareThis allows users to share content from anywhere to anyone and also offers a so-called ‘social advertising platform’ called AudienceShare.

Fergason will henceforth lead ShareThis’ overall marketing strategy and execution. She previously held executive roles in marketing and business development at companies like Yahoo, where she was responsible for B2B marketing and industry outreach.

Fergason came to Yahoo with its acquisitions of Maven Networks, where she was VP of Marketing. She was also a member of the Major League Baseball Advanced Media executive team for six years, serving in a similar role.

ShareThis competes with companies like AddThis (which claims installs on 7 million domains and a reach of 1 billion users per month) and Gigya (which claims a reach of more than 280 million users across more than 500,000 sites).

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. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week.

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 (note that these are relative numbers) :

Distribution of shared items
Facebook: 44%
Twitter: 29%
Yahoo:18%
MySpace:9%

It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins.

Here are the stats:

Share of Authentication By Platform:

News sites:
Facebook: 31%
Google: 30%
Yahoo: 25%
Twitter: 11%
AOL: 3%

Entertainment sites:
Facebook: 52%
Google: 17%
Yahoo: 12%
Twitter: 11%
MySpace: 7%
AOL: 1%

Facebook Chat is also a strong option, making up more than half of all live event chats measured by Gigya.

Live Event Chat:
Facebook: 56%
Twitter: 28%
Yahoo: 9%
MySpace: 7%

Update: A broader view of sharing on the Web comes from Gigya competitor AddThis, which has its sharing buttons on more than 600,000 Websites. (Gigya tends to be on larger content sites). AddThis also shows Facebook on top when it comes to sharing on the Web, but with a smaller 33 percent share. Twitter is at 9 percent, but it gets beat by email and printing out content as options provided by AddThis. Even with these broader numbers, more than 40 percent of sharing is through Facebook and Twitter.

Top 10 Services, Overall

Facebook: 33%
Email: 13%
Print:9%
Twitter: 9%
Favorites: 8%
Google: 6%
MySpace: 6%
Digg: 3%
Live: 3%
Delicious: 3%

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.

The Distribution Manager allows Flash developers to put a share button on their apps, which opens up a menu giving consumers the option to send that particular widget to Facebook, iGoogle, MySpace, My Yahoo, or various other destinations. It also supports the iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Symbian phones. (Since the iPhone does not yet support Flash, a version of the apps must already be present in the iTunes Store in non-Flash form).

Many advertisers themselves are creating Flash widgets which they are hoping will be spread around virally. They can buy installs on Adobe’s widget network for $1 per install. On the flip side, developers who choose to run these ads will get an effective CPM of $5 (i.e., for every 1,000 impressions). Adobe and Gigya will split whatever is the difference between those two numbers, which will be a function of the exact (undisclosed) revenue share, the number of times an ad widget is installed, and how often it is passed along.

Developers also get an Adobe AIr app which helps them keep track of all of their widgets. They can measure unique users, number of impressions, interaction rates, installs, and how many times it is passed on. The Distribution Manager can also break down installs and usage by social network, device, or country. The next Flash platform service Adobe wants to role out is the ability to develop an app once and distribute it anywhere without re-writing the app.

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).

Gigya has also shared some early stats for ElfYourself, the viral dancing elves videos made by OfficeMax that saw an incredible amount of traffic over the last holiday season, with numbers that rivaled Facebook’s visitors (at least for one month out of the year). For this year ElfYourself partnered with JibJab to produce the online videos, and the stats are similarly impressive. During the last three weeks of December, the new ElfYourself widget was installed nearly one million times-an impressive feat given the fact that embeds weren’t even available for last year’s videos. If you’d like to see some of the TechCrunch team get elf’ed, check out this video (warning: it isn’t pretty).

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.

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.

Gigya currently monetizes only its Wildfire service, and it does so through the use of branded widgets that get offered to consumers after they add non-branded widgets to their profile pages and blogs. While President Rooly Eliezerov says the company has plans to monetize Socialize a few quarters from now (through sponsored news feed items and other advertising-related means), it is currently focused on distributing the technology as widely as possible for free. The company has been working with big brands and media companies such as Fox Searchlight, which has integrated Socialize into its official Choke website.

Eliezerov says that, eventually, he expects Socialize to become about ten times the value of the Wildfire widget network since many websites (small and large) will become connected to social networks over the next couple of years.

Currently, Socialize exchanges data with both MySpace and Facebook. The former only allows outbound data requests, such pulling in user information and friend lists. The latter allows both outbound requests and inbound ones, such sending back messages and news feed items. Gigya Socialize will hook up to more social networks as they open up. It will also include more functionality for Facebook and MySpace once they loosen up their terms of service.

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 a form of lead generation. This functionality, however, would be entirely opt-in on the part of publishers.

No websites have yet to roll out Gigya Socialize, although EA Games is said to be working on an implementation and RockYou has shown interest as well.

The company has raised $14.5 million from Hummer Winblad, Sequoia Capital and Northgate Capital. Hummer Winblad has been around since 1989 and has invested $620 million of so in startups. Price feels that Widgetbox is poised to take advantage of the huge surge in widget usage. And if the AOL acquisition of Goowy and the recent Slide valuation is any indication, there’s lots of room to grow for Widgetbox.

I asked Price to write a guest post telling us why he made the decision to leave a very safe and very lucrative job and enter the very unsafe and risky world of startups again. His post is below, although it can largely be summed up in this post, too. If you want to follow Price’s regular updates, his blog is here.

My name is Will Price and until yesterday I served as a General Partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an early stage venture capital firm that was founded in 1989 (investments include TheKnot, Napster, HubPages, Omniture, Powersoft, Hyperion and others). While passionate about the firm and the venture industry, I am leaving Hummer Winblad today to take the CEO role at one of the startups I invested in – Widgetbox.

Michael Arrington kindly offered me the chance to explain my decision to leave venture capital and to join Widgetbox as the CEO. While the detail follows, in summary the combination of my personal aspirations to return to an operating role and my passion for the widget market and the company (which I helped seed fund) made this a no-brainer move for me.

My logic:

The best markets and the best companies ride the tide of history. Widgets are such a market.

The Web’s tide is open, distributed, standard, user-defined, and, in many ways, the most powerful force of the modern era. Widgets are not a fad, or web 2.0-hype, but fundamentally they are the unit by which users are assembling and defining their web experience.

Widgets are portable applications that are user-defined, user-assembled, and consumed independent of the source of the underlying content, commerce, and application functionality. The combination of user-control and decentralized interaction to important services represents an important paradigm shift in how users discover, select, and consume the best of the web.

In Nov 2007, Comscore reported that 650m global uniques, or 65% of the web universe, interacted with a widget. The growth in widget adoption and social media speaks to users’ unmet needs and frustrations with traditional web models. Today, brands, developers, media companies, and established Internet players are racing to understand the forces driving user behavior and the power of a more componentized and distributed web. While widget penetration is at 65% of Internet users and growing, spend in the widget category in 2007 was less than $20m, or 0.1% of the total online ad spend
market.

The 650x differential between spend and the record growth in user adoption is very powerful to consider. Users are always ahead of the market, as evidenced by the systemic under-allocation of ad dollars on-line; 21% of media consumption is on-line vs. 7% of ad spend. However, this 3:1 imbalance is steadily eroding and the widget market will prove to be no different and no less transformative. Traditional portal models that aggregate users and resell that aggregation are fundamentally at odds with the emerging paradigm of user and community defined experience and distributed consumption.

Marketers need to fish where the fish are, however, in an early market there are often more questions than answers. While widgets are enjoying end-user success, the commercial relevance of widgets remains unclear to many. Are widgets a new marketing channel? If so, are they effective? How do you build them, buy them, track them? What is the unit of value; an impression, an install, an engagement…? What type of ecosystem will form around the phenomena? In order to move beyond fad status, an economic model for the widget ecosystem needs to be better developed and measurable value delivered to both end-users and marketers.

Widgetbox, along with Slide, Rockyou, Goowy, Clearspring, Gigya, and others, is working to enable users, developers, brands, media houses, and incumbents to ride the tidal wave of web componentization.

Widgetbox, backed by Hummer Winblad, Sequoia Capital, Northgate Capital, and Michael Dearing, is the web’s largest gallery of widgets. Widgetbox’s growth in the past year has been extraordinary, with a current monthly audience of 30m uniques, 400m monthly widgetviews, and widgets installed across 230,000 domains.

For those of you who read my blog, you know that I am passionate about the venture capital industry and its importance in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. As a General Partner at Hummer Winblad, I enjoyed the exposure and access to some of the key innovators and drivers of the new economy; company’s like Omniture, Move Networks, Mulesource, Widgetbox, and many others. At 36, however, I felt a persisting and important pull to embark on a new journey of growth, discovery, and learning.

In my career to date, I have found that if you follow your heart, work tirelessly, and fish in good waters, good things will happen. For Widgetbox and our colleagues in the space, good things will continue to happen if we stay true to the web’s architecture of openness, distribution, and standardization and to users’ passion for empowerment, expression, and need for community.

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 ads on that site.

If you’d like to sign up for the service, use the code “techcrunch” and get 1,000 free impressions to start. The first 1,000 registrations qualify.

Their first product was a Flash-based webtop or alternative operating system. But later they went into the widget space with their YourMinis product, and that is the reason AOL has acquired them.

AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages David Liu said this was a deal they’ve been considering for the last nine months, and that they plan to integrate Goowy’s technology into both user-facing AOL products (to widgetize them) as well as their Platform A advertising network. Expect Platform A to launch significant new advertising products in the widget space soon, Liu says.

This is a significant win for Goowy founder and CEO Alex Bard, who has run a tight operation over the years. The company has just six employees and raised a single round of financing from Mark Cuban in April 2006 (the size of that round remains undisclosed, but it was almost certainly under $1 million). He says the Goowy team will remain in San Diego for at least the short term.

Goowy competes with a number of startups in the widget advertising space, including Widgetbox, ClearSpring and Gigya. VideoEgg, Slide and RockYou also compete in this area.

AOL has been busy acquiring promising young startups – they bought Israel-based Yedda last November as well.

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.

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).

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.

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 sites. A number of other widget startups will be launching with Wildfire in the next week.

Gigya isn’t charging partners for the service, saying they have plans for expansion into mobile and other areas where they can begin to generate revenue. Co-founder and CMO Rooly Eliezerov says they want Gigya to be a platform for widgets, and their first two products (Gigya and Wildfire) are just the beginning.

The company has done a lot without spending much money to date. They’ve raised just $650,000 in a single financing round from Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital in November 2006. Even though the round was small, those are tier-one investors who must see a good long term business plan.

Update: It has been widely reported that the company has actually raised $4m. This is incorrect. They’ve raised just $650,000 to date, in a single round of financing last November.