Or rather promotional Web sites within Web sites. Imagine Facebook’s “Top Friends” widget if it were instead filled with a list of, say, Clorox products. “Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources,” said Christian Oestlien, the Google product manager overseeing the Gadgets program. “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”

The announcement of this new ad avail is a timely one. According to online measurement company comScore, more than 48% of Internet users in the United States–over 87 million people–use widgets. That’s the sort of audience metric marketers swoon over. And Google knows this all too well, although apparently it’s a proconsumer initiative and not a money-making one when viewed through its “don’t-be-evil” lens. Said Oestlien, “We’re not trying to monetize every single event that happens in a creative, [we want advertisers] to make rich creative ads that are really useful to the end user.”