Many congrats to our Media Services team and advertising product team for making this product such a success… Stay tuned. We’ve been working hard to make this product even better.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can jump start the distribution of your widget using our Widget Promotion Channel or if you’d be interested in monetizing your Web site by joining our network of content affiliates, fill in your information on our contact page and check “Advertising with Clearspring.”

Now you don’t have to take our word for it. We are pleased today to announce that we’ve become the very first widget network to receive accreditation from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Interactive (ABCi).

For several months, ABCi was granted unfettered access to the processes, systems and people here at Clearspring Central Command in McLean, Virginia. They thoroughly and rigorously reviewed everything to guarantee the numbers were getting reported correctly.

The metrics included in the audit were: views, unique visitors, placements created, active placements, clicks, clickthroughs, events, geographic report, computer information, interacted views, clicked views, average time spent, and average interaction time.

This is something we’ve been working on a for a while and are super proud of. We want to raise the bar for acceptable service for a widget network, which means being held accountable to industry standards and best practices by a third party.

We know this is important to you, especially those of you who buy advertising. According to a survey commissioned by ABCi, “ad buyers indicated they would be even more inclined to advertise in emerging forms of media if audited by an independent third party.”

Pointroll is the leading rich media vendor in the advertising space. With over 60% of the market, they serve 60B+ impressions/year and have over 1500 publishers in their network. For those of you geeks that are not familiar with them, rich media advertisements are those really flashy advertisements that you can play with.

This partnership is focused around two areas. First, we will be introducing a new product for advertisers – SnaggableAds. SnaggableAds couple Pointroll’s rich media technology with our viral syndication services to enable users to grab widgets through traditional advertising units. For example, imagine you see an ad for the new Rambo movie that expands to show the trailer. With SnaggableAds, users can now grab the trailer and place it on your favorite blog, start page, social network, or desktop. Ad networks are now distribution channels for widgets.

The second area that we are partnering on is a project we call ‘The Widget Ad Network.’ This service is targeted toward widget publishers that are looking to monetize their creations. Specifically, we are collaborating to deliver a new ad format specifically for widgets. We have got some other great partners here on the operations, publisher, and advertising front like Adify, NHL, Fox, Virgin Mobile and Lions Gate.

Thanks to everyone on both teams that worked so hard to make this happen.