Monetizing Widgets

There’s a lot of good talk about widgets in the venture capital space. See for example Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere and YAWP – Yet Another Widget Post. I see widgets as yet another form of mashups, so to me this is really a question of monetizing mashups. As Brad says, “To me, widgets are application packagers that enable you to embed specific functionality from a web site (or web service) into another web site,” which is simply a form of mashup.

The one thing I missed from all of these discussions is self-service. Widgets are all about self-service, that’s there strength. That’s why people are talking about them. Let me explain.

A widget is a snippet of code, or HTML, that provides some value. For example, it may show the latest stock chart for a company that you are tracking, or list the last several posts in an RSS feed, or provide a game. Whatever. And they’re packaged in some neat way. They’re also configurable, to an extent. But so what? Here’s some reusable, packaged functionality called a widget – what makes them rock?

Well, the fact that every Tom, Dick and Harry can use them, that’s why. Any newbie web site creator can paste in a one-liner and lo and behold, there’s a stock chart – dynamically updated. That’s self service. And here’s the key. People build web sites. Or rather, they compose them these days. In Service-Oriented Architecture speak people no longer build applications, they compose them. When I created this blog using WordPress, I got a great little menu of widgets I could add to my sidebar. Self-service. And that’s, I think, where the money lies.

WordPress.com should be charging there. Creating a marketplace. Yes, provide some for free, but create the bazaar where I can shop for those widgets. Give the widget-makers an obvious way to monetize their code, and give the self-service blog writers an obvious way to find and pay for the widgets.

This is exactly what Salesforce do at the AppExchange of course. In both cases, it’s about monetizing at the point of use. It’s clean. It’s simple. It’s self-service.

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