It’s been quite a busy week for widget companies. RockYou kicked things off by announcing its $35 million Series C round on Monday. KickApps and Clearspring partnered to bolster their respective widget efforts on Tuesday. And now Widgetbucks is announcing that it has raised an additional $10 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Ignition Partners.
The Series B round brings Widgetbucks’ total to just under $20 million (the first institutional funding came from Ignition alone in February 2007).
Widgetbucks claims to have reached 100 million unique visitors in May through its advertising network (the widgets it serves are essentially interactive advertisements intended to deliver higher yields than traditional banner ads). ComScore’s numbers struggle to line up - they show only 10 million uniques for Widgetbucks in March, although that alone placed the company among other top niche networks like Snap Shots and AdOn, all of which appear to have been discounted.
Dean Jutilla, director of marketing for Widgetbucks, says the discrepancy is due to differences in the way ComScore and Widgetbucks tracked impressions. Widgetbucks pulled its data from its CDM Akamai and tracked visitors globally, while ComScore looked only at US numbers.
I tried using these guys and I got a massively underreported CTR.
I dugg around and I found that people had similar poor experiences:
http://www.google.com/search?h.....bucks+scam
I’m not trying to put a hate on this company, I’m only bringing this up because I was surprised to see these guys getting Series B funding.
Note: Even Googling AdSense+Scam yields a massive number of results, the posts however seem to have less credence than the WB complaints.
http://www.google.com/search?h.....dsese+scam
I have used this company since March of this year and have seen much better revenue from their ads over Google adwords. I track all my sites closely in Excel and have found some of my best results through Widget Bucks. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain their payouts as the widgets are placed on more and more websites.
I’d wish them well, but despite covering them previously apparently I wasn’t good enough to be part of their program.
I’d also note that while comScore isn’t brilliant outside of the United States, they actually do track numbers offshore. comScore does a reasonable job in parts of Asia and Europe. Saying comScore only tracks US numbers is factually incorrect.
Mark, the crunchbase link on the logo doesn’t work!
Matt — thanks. Fixed.
First they offer high CPC than adsense & adbrite - http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo.....d-adbrite/ then the revenue increases further more to 28cents/click on an average http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo.....k-minimum/ and at the end of the moment just before payment time they dont allow NON-US publishers - http://www.amitbhawani.com/blo.....dgetbucks/ wow thats nice and a very honour to all the publishers who helped them in getting those millions of impressions. Thousands of publishers replaced their other ad networks with widgetbucks in a hope to make better revenue but finally were lead to nothing.
In short WidgetBucks sucks because of some wrong policies and announcement of the same at the wrong time.
Our semantic search widget network currently reaches several million monthly users and we display search-related ads that should be more relevant than those delivered by WB. I am wondering what kind of CTR (Click-Through–Rate) WB ads have.
link on the logo doesn’t work!
Probably the worst ad network ever .. 8000 page views give you 5 cents - how bad can that get ?
Mike
How long have you worked at widgetbucks ?
@Duncan - I didn’t mean to suggest comScore generally ignores worldwide figures, they just didn’t account for them in this particular report.
from the looks of this thread, it doesn’t seem like another $10 million was a wise decision. I hope it works out for WB though.
I’m totally confused between WidgetBucks and WidgetBox.
There is another of this type of Social App monetization product that just launched here in the DC area. ( http://eastcoastblogging.com/2.....cial-apps/)
It is called SocialCash and seems very similar to this company. You should take a look at them to see what you think.
@Jayson - If investors based their funding on TechCrunch comment threads, I don’t think there would any funding in the tech industry.
If you sell electronics or tech products it may work for you
otherwise not a lot of there there
Mark
you were quoting them so the comment wasn’t directed at you.
Widget bucks offered high cpc than google adsense at starting..
Now :((