The next best thing in internet advertising is already here with widgets. Widgets, also known as gadgets, are embeddable chunks of code  that can be implemented into any HTML coded site without any need for compiling from the end user. This means a lot of potential for creating intelligent, clever, and interactive widgets that could prove useful for many companies.
When you buy space for an ad on another website, you are paying for prime real estate, depending how valuable that website is. Now as to how you want to develop that space is up to you. Many companies take the tired and ineffective approach of filling up those valuable spaces with banner ads.

These ads are barely to completely non-interactive and the only people I can think of who would detract themselves from viewing their favorite site to click on banner ads are people with short attention spans.

Now I am not saying widgets are any better than banner ads, at least for the moment. Instead of capitalizing on this new technology to develop available ad space into something truly innovative and interactive, many companies have made gimmicky and half-baked attempts at interactivity. These include little, gimmicky games with monkeys and shooting inanimate objects, trivia puzzles, or some other meaningless and irrelevant distraction. Don´t get me wrong, I like to play these silly games from time to time, my favorite being a simplistic batting simulation on a baseball site or a full game of golf, but I never really spend time on the website I am redirected to.

I  am just telling it like it is and just giving personal and professional opinion on how widgets can outperform traditional advertising. For example, why not use the ad space you bought and turn it into an extension of your  website? Someone is basically letting you put your products, information, and content on their own site, like a little colony. Let´s maximize that colony to it´s full productive potential. A better way to explain this is, it´s not very intriguing for users to see a static billboard on a site and even less intriguing for them to click  it and be redirected to another site. And no, the advent of browser tabs will not save traditional banner ads. My idea for widget ads would be to not even make them ads.

You could put your website in miniature form and put it on another site. The end user can then look around in your site, personalize and customize orders, and purchase what they want to right from that little widget ad.

Doesn´t that sound  a million times better than static banner ads option who nobody really pays attention to and click throught is only «by mistake»?

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