A step in the right direction: Widget company Clearspring passes ad audit
Widget companies may have widgets that get hundreds of millions of page views and visitors, but measuring their traffic has been tricky. Comscore and other third party services are still refining their methodologies, and have been criticized for undercounting the traffic of some companies.
Widget syndication and tracking service Clearspring has had itself successfully audited by third-party media auditing service, the Audit Bureau of Circulations Interactive (ABCi), both to solve the traffic analysis problem and brand itself as more in tune with advertisers’ needs than its competitors.
Clearspring launched a widget ad network last fall, where advertisers can run ads on widgets that users embed on social network pages and other sites. It already has large clients, like Turner, Disney and NBC. Now, when an advertiser buys an ad that runs in a Clearspring application, they can choose to rely on this third party to feel more confident about Clearspring’s reported numbers.
Metrics that were subject to audit, the company says, included: views, unique visitors, placements created, active placements, clicks, clickthroughs, events, geographic report, computer information, interacted views, clicked views, average time spent, and average interaction time.
This is one step of many that social networks and the third-party applications that use them are trying, with the goal of convincing large advertisers that advertising to social network users can work better than other advertising mediums.
McClean, Virginia-based Clearspring, which claims to be the largest platform that lets users and advertisers create widgets, may spur its rivals, including Widgetbox and Gigya, to also go through an audit. The larger question is how advertisers will react. Clearspring, which recently raised a large funding round, says that many people in the ad industry have been asking about audits for some time. How much will money can the company get for its widget ads, as a result.
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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.