Many thanks to the Burnout-info team!

TechCrunch recently reported similar findings in its article ‘The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes‘ which points out that according to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review report, 52% of traffic is consumed on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25.

long tail video trends

1)       Google AdSense and similar services are the main source of revenue for a majority of content websites, yet the advertisers that appear inside these ad units are, to a large extent, of junk quality – spam, phishing and other types of bad actors easily find their way into these ad units. Using CPM arbitrage, these bad actors can promote themselves onto high-quality content sites that would otherwise never allow such advertisers onto their properties.

2)       An over-capacity in publishers ad inventory is chasing too few quality advertisers, driving down CPM/CPC rates. At the same time advertisers hate CPM/CPC models because they are not linked to performance and are subject to click fraud respectively.

3)       Publishers as well as advertisers are facing an ever more fractured landscape. A publisher’s audience is no longer just on their website, but is also visiting their fan page on Facebook or using the publisher’s iPhone app. The same goes for advertisers. How then do publishers/advertisers monetize traffic in such a distributed environment ?

NextWidgets solves all three of the above issues. Firstly there are no junk advertisers inside NextWidgets. Every brand or merchant partner is qualified and the ultimate control over which brand/merchant will appear on a publisher’s page rests with the publisher. Secondly, the issue of over-capacity is solved because publishers can always use NextWidgets to generate sales and the advertisers can always be sure that they are only paying for actual performance. And finally, NextWidgets solves the issue of fragmented distribution because it work across all the major emerging platforms such as Facebook and iPhone.

Our fond history with Health 2.0 started in late summer of 2008, just as we were making the first plans for what would later become NextWidgets. Through a stroke of luck, James Mathews, who was at that time working at Sage and organizing a panel at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, became aware of our online pharmacy platform project in Romania and contacted us to find out more. During the course of our first call, James became convinced that our idea of trying to intertwine e-commerce, content publishing and social networking into one platform and to use e-commerce as a revenue generator for the other two, was interesting enough that it would be worth showcasing during his ‘Health 2.0 Around the World‘ panel. That was one of the driving forces that pushed us to work day and night for the next months to turn our widget idea into an alpha-demo reality that could be shown on stage. Almost up to the last minute, our entire team was feverishly working on the alpha version and just managed to get it ready on time for the presentation.

The conference itself was amazing and seeing all the demo’s and so many hundreds of people all motivated by eHealth increased our own motivation. For the next year we set about to take all the lessons we had learned and start from scratch in developing a completely new platform using the latest .NET technologies. By the summer of 2009 we had launched our first HTML based widgets on a couple of test sites. The results were positive and showed us that a shopping widgets could generate sales on a publishers page. Around the same time, Health 2.0 was coming around again and so we applied to present the finished HTML widgets. The organizers felt that we had made sufficient progress to make it interesting for the audience and so once again we found ourselves in San Francisco.

Following the conference, we accelerated the pace of development on a Flash version of the widget which allowed us to design it in IAB standard sizes. This was quickly followed by a Facebook and iPhone version as well. It is these latest developments which we will be showcasing at Health 2.0 in Paris.

If you would like to see our widgets in action, please visit the Health 2.0 website and order your ticket today.

The publisher section now has an even faster self-service widget creation process which allows for customization of both HTML and Flash widgets.

Hope you enjoy the new website and please leave us your comments.

Over the past weeks the battle for becoming the premium payments processing provider entered the next round with Amazon announcing the launch of Mobile Payments Service and PayPal launching PayPal X. The importance of both of these products is significant for everyone, the developer community, consumers and ultimately the two companies themselves. This fun report by The Next Web shows just how committed PayPal seems to be to the project.

Although these services will surely be successful and we’ll explore how we can best integrate both into NextWidgets, the ultimate winners in mobile payments may be the mobile carriers themselves. There is nothing easier and cheaper than being able to have a purchase charged straight to your mobile monthly bill. Carriers such as Vodafone and Swisscom are already experimenting in this direction.

Amongst these giants, there are also smaller companies offering innovative services. Zong has been pioneering the possibilities of making payments through the mobile phone for years, having created the first self-service solution for bloggers to charge for web content through mobile phones.

From a developers perspective, it becomes rather tricky to decide which services are best implemented in which markets and allocating resources accordingly, but overall the pace of change is a very positive thing for consumers who will enjoy the benefits of streamlined shopping through numerous mobile payment options.

The positive news for online business was that online advertising was less affected than traditional media which witnessed a 15.4% drop in the last two quarters.

MediaPost reported similar, although even worse figures provided by IDC, showing a 5% decline globally and a 7% decline in the US, with online display ads being hit very hard with a 12% decline in spending.

Of course this is rather positive news for us here at NextWidgets because it means even more brands and retailers will or already are switching from traditional web 1.0 advertising, to performance based systems like ours.