Mpire and the year of the widget
Looking to capitalize on its shopping analytics, Seattle's Mpire today is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce "widgets." — The free "widgets" — small online applications or tools that easily plug in to Web sites — will allow bloggers and online publishers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mpire's launch lands two days after Michael Arrington's Attack of the Advertising Widgets post catalogued a market already crowded with widget makers selling ads inside embeddable modules. Seattle's Mpire takes a different angle into that same scrum: it converts its existing shopping-analytics engine into roughly 80 free widgets aimed squarely at eBay and Amazon affiliates.
First-order effects
- Bloggers and online publishers get free plug-in shopping tools they can drop into their sites, earning eBay and Amazon affiliate commissions on transactions the widgets drive.
- Mpire trades its closed analytics product for open distribution, betting its data advantage shows up in conversion rates rather than subscription fees.
Second-order effects
- Widget startups in the advertising model Arrington described now compete against a rival whose widgets carry no ad inventory at all — Mpire monetizes through affiliate splits, undercutting the ad-slot pitch to publishers.
- eBay and Amazon's affiliate programs gain thousands of new embeddable storefronts, pushing more transaction volume through commission structures the two platforms control.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the widget becomes a commodity distribution layer and competition shifts to whoever owns the underlying shopping data — favoring analytics-driven entrants like Mpire over pure ad-placement players.
- Publisher monetization fragments away from destination-site banner economics toward per-transaction commissions earned wherever readers already are, a structure the affiliate giants can reprice at will.
The trend: E-commerce distribution is breaking out of destination sites into embeddable widgets monetized through affiliate programs, with data quality replacing ad inventory as the differentiator.