Vflyer releases classified ad widget
Vflyer, the San Francisco start-up that lets you distribute your classified ad to multiple Web sites, tomorrow unveils a new widget service to profile the ads more easily elsewhere.
The move is notable because vflyer is offering the service as part of a premium service (it has various plans, but the basic one is $19.95 per month). So far, widget mania has been a largely free movement. Photo and video sites, for example, have offered widgets to the masses to use on social networking profiles at Myspace or on personal blogs. Mainstream Web sites have started using widgets increasingly to augment their business and content. However, Vflyer is trying to show that it can actually make money by making widget services part of a premium account. The company has started generating revenue, however is not yet profitable, says co-founder Oliver Muoto.
We first wrote about the company here.
Vflyer works by letting you create an ad, and then helps you distribute it for to free-listing places like Google Base, Oodle and Craigslist, and to paid-listing sites as well. Last month, the company introduced premium accounts. Tomorrow, vflyer lets real estate agents, for example, with paid accounts create widgets for their blogs, which can be used to show slideshows or videos of their entire inventory of homes. Similarly, car-dealers can use the widgets to show off their fleet of cars, or bands to can use them to showcase their upcoming events. These are dynamic, having photos that scroll continuously, and are not static as in the screenshot below.
A point-and-click widget editor lets people customize one of several Flash or JavaScript widget formats. It then generates the necessary HTML code to cut-and-paste them on their site, eBay page or social networking site.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
