Could another Web 2.0 technology fusion be on the horizon? As in, widget meets advertising, new love affair blossoms? That would seem to be the gist of the latest online advertising development, with Google now saying it will do a full launch this summer of its Gadget Ads. 
It didn’t take the 800-pound gorilla long to figure out that advertisers were coveting all the space that content publishers have been devoting to widgets. Many of these advertisers would naturally like to push their wares inside little embedded, interactive pieces of web real estate, too. It’s not just about getting a click-through; these things offer great branding possibilities as well.
Steve Rubel reported yesterday about this latest move on his Micropersuasion blog under the headline, Google Widgetsense Is a Reality. He based his post on a piece Niall Kennedy did a bit earlier, called Google Gadgets Are Now an AdSense Unit. That, in turn, was based on news broken at an event by Tameka Kee of Online Media Daily: Google Tests ‘Gadget Ads’. And it was all later breathlessly reported by Pete Cashmore at Mashable thusly: Gadget Ads!. Got all that? Such is the blogosphere — and all that reporting happened in a matter of a few hours!
Just a few weeks ago, in a guest post I did on Read/Write Web from the Web 2.0 Expo in SF, entitled Widgetsphere: New Playground For Marketers, I raised this question of where does a widget stop and an ad begin? Well, it appears the line is growing fuzzier as we speak. Capitalism marches on!
UPDATE: To accurately label Google as an 800-pound gorilla, not an 80-pound one. 🙂
And the trend gains more momentum, as TechCrunch now reports:
Attack of the Advertising Widgets
Widgets is a great way of maximizing the potential of the blog and minimizing the task of the admin. Google Widget and Gadget is much of use for the webmaster.