Adobe Gets Into Widget Distribution And Advertising With Help From Gigya
Many of the widgets scattered across the Web are made in Flash, but Adobe doesn't participate in the widget economy. Today, it is taking a first tentative step towards changing that with the release …
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe built the runtime most web widgets run on, yet until now it has sat outside the widget economy entirely — a gap critics sharpened this month by noting Adobe captured little of YouTube's $1.65B sale even though Flash powered the video behind it. In February the company took a first crack at closing the gap by improving distribution and monetization for mobile Flash apps.
Today's Gigya partnership extends that move to the desktop web: Gigya supplies the social distribution network, Adobe supplies the Flash install base, and both share in the advertising. It lands four days after Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Omniture, pairing content creation with the optimization and measurement side of the business.
First-order effects
- Flash widget developers gain a built-in path to distribute across social networks and earn ad revenue through Adobe and Gigya, instead of giving that value to third-party widget platforms.
- Gigya gets Adobe's reach and legitimacy behind its distribution layer, while Adobe finally books revenue on the millions of Flash widgets already embedded across the web.
Second-order effects
- Standalone widget platforms and social networks that currently host these widgets face the runtime owner taking a cut of the ad inventory inside their pages, pressuring their own revenue shares.
- With Omniture pending, widget engagement data flows toward Adobe's analytics stack, letting it sell advertisers measurement plus placement — a bundle rivals building widgets on Flash must now weigh.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the runtime itself becomes an advertising channel: whoever owns the installed base that renders content moves upstream into distribution, targeting, and measurement, reshaping where value accrues in the widget economy.
- Embedding ads and tracking deeper into Flash raises the stakes on the format's security posture, which analysts had already flagged as a prime criminal attack target after a summer of zero-day disclosures.
The trend: Platform owners are pushing down from enabling runtimes into the distribution and advertising layers above them, converting installed bases into monetization channels.