AOL introduces ads into YourMinis Widgets

Goowy, with its YourMinis widget and Goowy desktop apps was one of those companies with products that had great potential; they were however acquired by AOL sometime ago who eventually discontinued the main website for YourMinis, though they have said the widgets originating from the site would continue to work.

Update: According to Gary Benitt of AOL’s YourMinis non targeted ads have been removed from the widgets and better ones would start to show up in the widgets.

HTMLCenter, one of the sister sites of this website runs a widget from YourMinis which shows some of the most recent posts on CN (This is illustrated in the images below).  A cursory check at some point showed that the widget now also hosts advertisements in them as well. The adverts were mostly non-targeted ads concerning flat stomachs and wrinkles which were totally unrelated to the contents of the tech blog.

Widgets and advertising done on widgets would continue to attract lots of attention and discourse specifically for reasons such as this. A website owner comes across a particular widget which they feel would be useful and they install it into popular posts on their blog or website only to come back at some later period to discover that the developers or company behind the creation of the widget had included some form of unrelated advert or contents into the widget without any prior notification to the users of the widget. Issues such as this will continue to generate hot debates on widget advertising especially given the present state of the economy.

It is pertinent to understand what should happen in situations where a website or blog owner for instance installs a widget that concerns a new film that’s to start showing in the theaters soon, as soon as the period for movie’s run in theaters is over, should the company behind the movie widget have the right to change the content of such a widget at will without adequately notifying the owners of the sites that had installed it as a result of the initial movie. If companies feel they can do this at will, then brands could just go ahead to start developing widgets at a geometric rate to promote their consumer brands.

From the instant a site or blog owner decides to go ahead and install a widget on portions of their site, they have given the widget developer that portion of their website basically for free. While there no adequate records kept for widgets unlike what is applicable to most advertising networks, the leeway site owners have given to widget developers by choosing to install their widgets ought to make the companies or developers behind such widgets be able to put in some extra effort to inform site owners of any changes that would be introduced into the widgets at different points in time.