AOL Buys Widget Provider Sphere Source

San Francisco-based Sphere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Dulles, Va.-based AOL as part of its Platform-A advertising network.

Sphere uses contextual-search platform technology to make connections between content from blogs, video, media, photos and advertisements. The results are displayed in a pop-over window or an integrated widget that allows publishers to enhance articles by incorporating related articles and blog posts from archived content and across the Web.

AOL has had an ongoing relationship with Sphere. The company has almost 50,000 content publishers and blogs and is live on an average of more than 2 billion article pages across the Web every month. Content providers using its technology include CNN, The Wall Street Journal, CBS and Reuters.

Sphere was founded by Tony Conrad, Martin Remy, Steve Nieker and Toni Schneider in 2005.

"[AOL] has seen steady growth as a result of the extensive programming and product upgrades they've made in the past year," said Tony Conrad on the Sphere company blog. "Platform-A, meanwhile, reaches 90 percent of the domestic online audience and has some of the most sophisticated targeting and measurement tools on the market, positioning them very well in the growing online display ad market. We think it's a huge advantage to become part of a suite of services that understands how Internet users access/ consume content, and how to intelligently monetize in tandem with that content. This is a win-win for our partners, AOL and Sphere."