Web widget provider JS-Kit has been doing a lot of growing up since starting as a simple commenting widget, founder Lev Walkin’s pet project in his off hours. Since then, that single widget has grown into a company with the addition of CEO Kris Loux, 12 engineers from Filmloop, and today’s $1.2 million round of financing led by the Entrepreneur’s Fund III.
JS-Kit’s library of widgets make it dead simple to add interactivity to your site. They have widgets for commenting, rating, polls, top rated content, and a combination for rated comments. Each of the widgets is fully skinable by CSS and only require a couple lines of code to add. Each of the widgets use javascript and are linked to page elements by the URL of the page or a customized id property.
Over 5,000 sites have added the widgets, adding 1,000 more each month. Combined, the sites generate over 70 million impressions each month. They’ve already got some ideas of how they want to monetize that traffic. One route is dropping advertisements into the widgets. Rather than putting ads in all the widgets, they’ve decided to only put ads in the “top rated content” widget. Publishers can either keep the ads and split the revenue 50/50, or pay about $40 a month/1 million pageviews your widget gets.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is one client which has simply opted to pay. They originally added the widget to their site to save themselves unnecessary development time. We made a similar choice when adding their ratings widget to CrunchBase.
Widgets as white labeled website features is a useful concept for publishers who don’t want to re-invent the wheel. Kickapps has done this somewhat with social networking. However, JS-Kit still has a bit to go in making their widgets viable for larger clients.
As easy to use as JS-Kit’s widgets are, it’s a tough proposition to ask larger businesses to hand hosting and control of their user’s data to JS-Kit. Businesses that depend the most on these features (and would therefore pay the most) may choose to spend the time to develop the feature in house and hedge against any future risk from depending on a web service.
Nick,
Kudos for JS-Kit! You should also check out Spotback. In addition to rating you can add related content recommendations, community features (who rated this) etc. They also have an extremely cool widget gallery and rating widget designer – you can create pretty cool stuff with it.
Greg.
Great to hear more garage stories!
Widgets such as these are making it extremely easy to add additional functionality to my clients websites. Another great widget service I have used is http://www.goodwidgets.com. It’s great for displaying client photos!
Keep the widget services coming!
I love those stories of small startups now getting articles on techcrunch.
It inspires me!
It sounds like a great service.
One which I am definitely going to check out.
I use Spotback strictly to do topic/content search. JS-Kit is doing some great stuff.
I don’t consider myself a techie. Last weekend I spent countless hours trying to find a widget that would allow readers of my living textbook to email information about it to others. Finally, late Sunday afternoon I found JS-Kit. It was so simple to use. By the way, I’m now looking for something as easy to use for developing page badges so that my readers can post a link to my website on their own sites. Any suggestions?
Great hearing that a garage company got some suckers VC money. Love that! Nothing against JS, but please tell me TC has better stories. This can’t be a top noteworthy story of the day.
Congratulations to JS-kit. Nice to see good products get recognized.
We just started to provide comment, review, and forum widgets at http://www.nuharbor.com as well, but we are trying to established a distributed social network for small business vendors and their customers.
JS-kit is good but I stopped using it after a few days, the technology is sound but the “no need to login” system wreaks havoc if you travel around a lot (ei: IP changes and cookies get cleared out). I got tired of verifying who I was over and over again. Introduce a login.
Jon
I tried JS-Kit, but one of the reasons to add interactivity to a page is the boost in search results from the content – you don’t get that w/js-kit since its pulling from their site.
so, Nick, where on The Chronicle of Higher Education site is their widget or widgets? you give us a link, but it goes nowhere…
Hi Graeme,
You can find JS-Kit Comment service on The Chronicle right here.
Why does someone think that this is worth a 1.2 MILLION dollar investment? I mean, it’s a nice little service that I can see bloggers and inexperienced webmasters using, but I don’t think the idea is worth a million bucks!
Nick, you are correct in pointing out that publisher control is the substance of the discussion.
It’s always been a “tough proposition” to sell an outsourced solution, at least in areas (like web services) where this tactic is relatively new. After all, there was once a time when outsourcing the data center or payroll seemed a “radical” idea. As you may have guessed, however, we believe that the historical trend in this area, as in so many others, will be toward focusing on the strategic “core” and sourcing the rest elsewhere.
There are certainly many companies who’s “core” involves their competitive expertise in designing, building and implementing community features that support their online presence. However, while most companies now appreciate the importance of the web as a crucial channel for their overall business, they also clearly understand that this does not make them technology companies. The question facing this “in play” market opportunity then becomes wether to build or buy? Answering it involves a full risk/reward assessment.
You rightly highlight one side of this equation; the “risk from depending on a web service.” On this front, JS-Kit is taking every measure possible to mitigate this risk, starting with our technology and our business model, which requires virtually no technical expertise to deploy, allows services to be up in minutes or hours (not weeks), and requires no long-term contracts. We are also building an external API which will allow our customers direct access to their data. For all but the most sophisticated sites JS-Kit’s current infrastructure (and we have much more in store) provides a level of data security and redundancy that they cannot, or won’t, provide for themselves.
But the stronger case for outsourcing actually lies on the other side of the equation.
Obviously, relative cost considerations are a huge factor here. Companies simply cannot compete cost-wise with a shared-service approach. Less appreciated, though, is the risk of not outsourcing. In-house solutions may mitigate data risk, but usually increase the risk that site features won’t keep pace with one’s competition. There is also the future issue of how and whether in-house solutions will provide the cross-site features that a shared platform can offer.
We believe that ultra-lightweight services of the sort we provide are the new building blocks for online applications. Most companies will build with them, but not build them. If we’re wrong, we’re wrong. If we’re right, our customers and investment partners will be deeply rewarded.
Be Well,
Khris Loux, CEO
JS-Kit
khris at js-kit.com
I tried the JS-Kit widgets when they only had a couple of features and Lev’s hands on help in answering questions and developing features was really cool. Well deserved and certainly a model for success.