May 2009
Clearspring Technologies, a leading widget and content sharing network has announced that National Geographic is using its services and can create, distribute, track and monetize widgets.
National Geographic's widgets allow fans to share photos, videos and puzzles with friends through social media Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle.
"National Geographic is committed to delivering ways for our audiences to engage with our compelling video content and award-winning photography," said Brendan Hart, VP marketing for National Geographic Digital Media.
"With Clearspring's widget platform, we are able to aggressively expand within this space and innovatively extend our century-old mission of inspiring people to care about the planet by connecting with our online audiences everywhere they live online."
National Geographic offers a variety of widgets with its premium content, including movie and music widgets, two puzzle widgets, daily news, photo of the day, and video of the day widgets. These widgets engage users and help introduce the brand to new audiences. The widgets help drive consumers back to the brand and increases traffic on www.NationalGeographic.com.
The Photo of the Day widget has been extremely popular, with grabs and views far outpacing the median metrics for widgets. Since launch in December 2007, the widget has had more than 39 million views and nearly 300 thousand installs. It has been grabbed from the top social networking and startpage environments, with approximately 37 per cent of the installs coming from Facebook and 50 per cent from Google. The Music Artist of the Day widget has also been popular with National Geographic fans and has an interaction rate of 21 per cent, with a 63 per cent interaction rate occurring in the Facebook environment.
"More than 86 per cent of views of National Geographic's videos take place off domain via widgets, showing the power of distributing content across the Web," said Peggy Fry, SVP of Clearspring.
"National Geographic identified our network as a tremendous opportunity to reach fans across the Web in an incredibly fun, engaging and effective way, reaching new readers and existing fans everywhere they live on the Internet."
National Geographic has embraced social media and currently reaches fans on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, multiple company blogs, and in all the places people share its widgets. With Clearspring, National Geographic joins major media companies such as MTVN, Time Warner and NBC-Universal, who have been at the forefront of using and monetizing social media.
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