I’ve been really pleased with the way NewsGator’s widget business has taken off. Two years ago I regularly got questions from people about "how would NewsGator monetize the consumer web reader business." The answer to that is "they won’t – but they’ll use the infrastructure they’ve build – which is rock solid, scalable, and unique – to build a really interesting widget and data business based on RSS content."
NewsGator now has over 100 paying customers for their widget business. Over the past 30 days, they’ve served almost 19 million unique users over 250 million widget views. They’ve also served over 44 million API calls to paying data partners (a total over over 385 million API calls if you include all the free clients out there, including NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, and NewsGator Go! that call the API on a regular basis.) This is in support of 2.8 million feeds and 211 million articles over the past 30 days. The overall NewsGator feed archive now stands at 2.1 billion articles. Non-trivial!
Today, NewsGator – with AFP – announced a new initiative called The Road to Beijing – the 2008 Games widgets. This is an Olympics game news widget with a twist – NewsGator will guarantee you a $0.20 CPM for distribution of the widget on you site! You’ll get co-branding on the widget, traffic, great Olympics content, and a guaranteed CPM.
Jeff Nolan – who runs this part of NewsGator’s business – has a long blog post up at NewsGator and AFP Olympics Widgets, Guaranteed CPM – explaining how it all works. Join NewsGator and APF on The Road to Beijing and make some money while you are at it.