Someone still has to (indirectly?) be making money from this. My guess is that this is a great source of general web analytics data, which someone will pay to have.
All of these widget companies seem like a bit of a scam to me. Do you really need $36M to create a bunch of crappy widgets? I've never even seen a widget from RockYou/Slide/Widgetbox/Clearspring on any of the sites I visit.
I couldn't agree more with how much money is spent on the lamest things... $36M for widgets. Then again, back in the 90's, people would pay thousands to have a counter installed on their page.