Gigya helps widget companies spread across web, track advertising

Venture Beat — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 01:00:57 -0700

Gigya, the Silicon Valley company that lets widget companies like Rockyou and others track how advertising performs on their widgets across the Web, has raised $9.5 million in a second round of funding.

Gigya, based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers ad-monitoring technology among a number of tools it supplies to widget-makers like Rockyou and other companies that make widgets. Gigya helps companies make widgets, but its real focus is on helping those companies — clients include Toyota, Sprint and MTV — spread the widgets across the web and track their performance. Among other things, Gigya provides drop-down menus that lets users select which social networks they want the widget on. See image below. This lets widget owners make say, Orkut the first choice, if the owner wants to market the widget among Brazilian users, or Facebook the first choice if the owner want to market to Canada 20-somethings.

The financing was led by the Mayfield Fund. Existing investors Benchmark Capital and First Round Capital participated.

Gigya technology is used to install hundreds of thousands of widgets per day, the company says. It tracks more than three billion widget impressions per month. It says it is the largest widget distribution network (see the logo-cloud at left, which shows the companies it serves). However, large widget companies like Slide use their own internal technology for distribution and tracking advertising impressions. Clearspring is another competing company, but Clearspring hosts widgets on its own servers, and so maintains more control over the widget making and distribution process. Gigya, by contrast, simply provides a code that is inserted into widgets, and customers like Toyota can choose to run the widgets from their own servers.

Gigya hasn’t focused too much on making money too date, instead it seeking to become the distribution standard on the Web. But Gigya plans to make money from revenue shares, for example from a company like Toyota, which might pay Gigya a fee for help in distributing its widget to third-party sites.
Co-founder Rooly Eliezerov told me he hopes the company will reach break-even within the next year and a half.

Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha joins Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg on Gigya’s board.