Building a Brand with Widgets

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Developers Are Lining Up to Make Widgets

Peers at other companies concur. "The great benefit of doing a Facebook application that only took three weeks to build is that it's very inexpensive and your opportunity to experiment is very high," says Neil Young, group general manager at Electronic Arts. Young says that Electronic Arts has spent less than $200,000 over several months with developer Context Optional to build and run a trivia game called Smarty Pants, a pared-down version of a Wii game by the same name that EA sells. He estimates that many independent developers charge between $15,000 and $50,000 a month to build and maintain branded applications such as Smarty Pants.

There's certainly no shortage of programmers willing to make widgets. Facebook has attracted more than 150,000 active developers since May, 2007, according to Developer Analytics, a company that tracks the Facebook developer community. One draw is that Facebook lets indie developers sell advertising on their applications and keep the profit. Yet some social networking sites, including MySpace, were initially reluctant to open pages to an influx of third-party widgets (BusinessWeek.com, 5/22/07). MySpace is now offering developers the opportunity to make money from their applications.

The same goes for social networking site Bebo, which officially opened to third-party developers on Dec. 12. Already NBA, Yahoo! (YHOO), Gap, and other brand marketers have created applications for the site. About 5,000 Bebo users have added the Gap's ModelMaker application, where they can become virtual Gap models by adding their photos and choosing outfits, a pose and a scene.

Plagued by Lack of Standard Metrics

RockYou's Tokuda says he also expects social networking sites hi5 and Orkut to give developers tools to create third-party applications within the next five weeks or so.

Still, it may be a while before widgets become an advertising and branding force to be reckoned with. Because of a lack of industry standard metrics, it's difficult to compare the relative success or failure of widgets, and just how much a widget is worth (BusinessWeek.com, 1/7/08). What's more, many users are getting turned off by advertising on social networking sites (BusinessWeek.com, 7/7/08). "I think application fatigue is real, and it will force people to look at what they're developing and how much they're spending," says TripAdvisor's Petersen.

Others wonder if advertising widgets can work at all on social networking sites. "Frankly, I'm very skeptical about the whole thing," says Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning at Media Associates, a media planning firm. Part of the problem, says Kunz, is that a person has to be receptive to advertising, and that's not the case with many people when they're surfing around social networking sites. "There's so much talk about viral marketing, but if it were really that easy to do, then everybody would be doing it."

Still, that isn't deterring A&E from going to the ad widget well. The company is considering widgets for shows besides Parking Wars, Peterzell says, adding: "We're in the middle of looking at concepts for returning series and for some other shows and titles being launched later this year."

King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.