Compelling content, available by seamlessly adding freely available widgets to a website or blog, has helped many publishers attract more readers and drive audience engagement for adjacent relevant ads. Readers can usually find the content in a sidebar on a site. A stand-alone application, called a “widget”, can be embedded into third party sites on a webpage, blog, or profile on a social media site by copying a line of code.
Widgets can add functionality to a site and come in many forms, such as clocks, translators, video players, contact forms, slide shows, search bars, news feeds, etc.
Content widgets can be fully customizable, offering a wide variety of sizes, topics, layouts and high quality images. A news website can be automatically updated with widgets that are being refreshed with new content frequently.
Content can be curated from a variety of sources that will complement sites and create an enhanced look and feel. Widgets have driven site traffic, impressions, click-through rates and shares to much higher levels as readers are able to find interesting content that captivates their attention and keeps their eyes focussed on the page so that the discoverability of ads becomes much more likely.
Many busy editors, who have been doing the work of two or three talented people, have increasingly relied on widgets to fill news holes. They have found extensive content creation is often too time consuming to accomplish on their own and widgets are a cost effective solution for meeting deadlines.
Some widget sites host dozens of pre-made widgets in a variety of categories, which is a lot more convenient to use as filler that trying to create content from scratch.
Online tutorials and easy to follow instructions have made widgets a highly user friendly experience. Thousands of news sites have used widgets successfully and the numbers of users have increased rapidly as the trend has caught on like wildfire.
For more information, ask the experts at North American Precis Syndicate, Featurettes News To Use, the most trusted source of feature news content for decades.
