A strategic partnership to further accelerate widget usage and monetization has been announced by the leading on demand social media platform, KickApps (http://www.kickapps.com ), and the world's largest widget syndication and tracking service, Clearspring Technologies Inc. Clearspring will promote, under the agreement, KickApps’ new WYSIWYG Widget Studio (currently in beta), a self-service widget-authoring environment to the Clearspring user base, enabling Clearspring customers to easily build their own rich-media and interactive widgets with tremendous ease. To provide one-click distribution and in-depth analytics to anyone using the KickApps Platform, KickApps will use Clearspring’s powerful distribution and tracking services.

The industry is turning its focus to widgets as a platform for advertising, with widgets becoming an integral part of every web publisher and marketer’s arsenal for driving audience growth. Including some of the world’s largest media & entertainment companies, with over 24,000 publishers using KickApps to create and deploy widgets, the company recently launched an internal initiative around the development of WidgeADs™, KickApps’ new industry standard format for widget advertising. The companies, using Clearspring’s WidgetMedia services, will collaborate on delivering a powerful end-to-end widget advertising solution for publishers and marketers. Tallying 47.5 million unique widget viewers in April 2008, according to comScore’s Widget Metrix report, Clearspring is the No. 1 widget platform in the U.S.

Widgets, like next-generation banner ads, are interactive Web applications that contain dynamically updated content, keeping them fresh and relevant to viewers, and driving traffic back to the publisher’s web site. Consumers can easily grab and post widgets that interest them to their personal homepage, social networking site, own websites, blog or desktop. Posted widgets retain their viral capability and can be shared time and again.

Founder and CEO of Clearspring, Hooman Radfar, stated: “Our vision is to deliver an end-to-end solution enabling marketers and publishers to reap the benefits of the emerging widget channel.” He added: “We have created innovative solutions for distribution, tracking, and monetization and we are well on the way to creating the Web’s most efficient widget ad network. In partnering with KickApps we deliver a one-stop shop for any publisher or marketer to create and distribute widgets.”