Mpire Launches Widgets for eBay and Amazon Affiliates
Mpire launches a new widget service today with over 75 different widgets aimed directly at eBay and Amazon affiliates. — It's a crowded space. On Sunday Michael Arrington described it well with a post aptly titled "The Attack of the Advertising Widgets".
Context & Ripple Effects
Mpire's launch lands two days after Michael Arrington's 'Attack of the Advertising Widgets' roundup cataloged how many startups are chasing the same embeddable-ad slot, so this is less a new category than a new entrant into a contested one. John Cook's same-day 'year of the widget' framing at the Seattle Venture Blog treats it as part of a broader 2007 wave rather than a standalone company bet.
The wedge is commerce-specific: instead of general ad units, Mpire ships 75-plus widgets tuned for eBay and Amazon affiliate programs, following AddThis's March 2007 demonstration ([[a:1177487]]) that widely embedded widgets double as data-collection surfaces. Both marketplace programs were actively recruiting off-site sellers in early 2007 — eBay after delisting virtual-property auctions in January and buying StubHub for $310 million, Amazon on the strength of Q4 2006 sales up 34%.
First-order effects
- eBay and Amazon affiliates get ready-made embeddable product and auction modules, lowering the technical bar for putting marketplace inventory on blogs and social-network profiles.
- Mpire enters the crowded advertising-widget field Arrington mapped on May 7, competing for placement against every other widget maker fighting for the same blog real estate.
Second-order effects
- Marketplaces benefit from distributed storefronts: every affiliate widget extends eBay's and Amazon's reach onto pages they don't control, reinforcing their affiliate recruitment economics.
- As with AddThis's data-gathering model, whoever's widgets spread widest accumulates clickstream and purchase-intent signals — making widget distribution a competitive advantage in audience data, not just referral fees.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, personal web pages consolidate into a mesh of third-party commerce and advertising units, shifting monetization power toward the platforms whose widgets are easiest to embed and hardest to displace.
- A widget economy running on unstandardized embeds creates demand for independent measurement of who actually sees and clicks what — a gap someone will move to fill as spend scales.
The trend: 2007 is shaping up as the year the widget turns personal pages into distributed storefronts, with affiliate-heavy marketplaces like eBay and Amazon supplying the inventory and startups like Mpire supplying the packaging.