Supernova 2007: Widget Webonomics

Speaking at the Supernova 2007 conference today, Slide CEO Max Levchin talked about his company's strategy to extract revenue from the massive proliferation of widgets. According to comScore, 177 million users interact with widgets, which are defined as embedded Flash objects.

"Probably less than .5 percent of widget traffic monetized in any way at all," Levchin said. Slide is looking at ads on widget and more interestingly as a kind of cash register, what Levchin called a "fully distributed marketplace lives on the page you are visiting." If you are watching a video or photo show in a Flash Web widget, you could go directly into a secure transaction using a credit card within the widget.

"It's the biggest new opportunity for monetization," Levchin said. Slide and its competitors could develop APIs, in the same way that Google AdSense gets inserted onto Web pages, for widgets that unleashes commerce in a new, more distributed way.