Ad network WidgetBucks raises $10M
WidgetBucks, a self-styled ad network for e-commerce widgets, doesn’t offer ads for the sorts of widgets that you see on social networks. Rather, it offers interactive ads that otherwise look like more traditional banner ads. See screenshot, below.
Sites can add WidgetBucks widgets to their own sites, somewhat similar to Google’s Adsense. Advertising revenue is based on both cost per thousand page impressions (CPM) ads, which pays based on the number of times an ad is seen by users, and cost per click ads, which pay when a user actually clicks through to another site through the widget.
The Seattle company, which launched eight months ago, says it has grown to a total of five billion ad impressions in its first eight months, and is averaging around a billion impressions per month now. In May, it was ranked among the top 30 US ad networks by Comscore, coming in as the second-largest niche widget maker. Around 100 million unique visitors were served a WidgetBucks ad, which spanned more than 20,000 publishers.
WidgetBucks parent company Mpire Corporation has recently secured $10 million in a second round funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, with participation from previous backer Ignition Partners.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.