Mochila Pairs With Gigya Widget Network
NY-based Media marketplace Mochila has partnered with widget network Gigya; the companies say they deal will let Mochila's content providers place their offerings on a variety of widgets, which Gigya can help distribute to Facebook, MySpace, blogs etc.
Context & Ripple Effects
The deal lands mid-way through what the trade press had already dubbed the year of the widget: May 2007 alone brought Mpire's push into affiliate widgets, a wave of advertising-carrying widgets, and Business Week asking who actually captures the value when content spreads off-site. Mochila, a New York marketplace that licenses editorial content to publishers, is now applying that same distribution logic to professional media.
What changed with this partnership is the channel rather than the product: instead of placing articles only with licensed publisher sites, Mochila's content providers can package their offerings into Gigya widgets that spread across Facebook, MySpace, and blogs — putting paid editorial inventory inside the social networks where audiences had migrated.
First-order effects
- Mochila's content providers immediately get a second distribution surface beyond traditional syndication deals, with Gigya handling widget creation and placement on Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.
- Gigya gains premium editorial content to fill its widget network, strengthening its pitch to advertisers that its placements carry real journalism rather than promotional material.
Second-order effects
- Rival content-syndication marketplaces now face pressure to match widget-based distribution or risk their publisher partners taking inventory to networks that already reach social platforms.
- Advertising intermediaries competing for widget placements — the space TechCrunch flagged as crowded back in May 2007 — see more branded content bidding for the same embeddable slots, tightening pricing on ad-supported widgets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, professional content distribution shifts from negotiated destination-site deals toward portable embeddable units whose reach depends on third-party platforms like Facebook and MySpace — echoing the walled-garden concerns commentators raised about Facebook just this week.
- Syndication economics move toward whoever controls the distribution layer — the widget networks and platforms — rather than the original content owners, a structural dependency that grows as more of the audience reads inside social networks.
The trend: Content syndication is shifting from licensed destination sites to widget-based distribution across social networks, with intermediaries like Gigya capturing the routing layer.