Former aQuantive Chief Financial Officer Michael Vernon has joined the board of WidgetBucks, a Seattle startup that is helping small online publishers and bloggers make money on advertising widgets they place on their Web sites. Vernon worked at aQuantive from 2000 to 2006, leaving before the Seattle online advertising company was sold to Microsoft for $6 billion.

“When it comes to core fundamentals within the online advertising space – monetization, expansion and targeting – WidgetBucks is well positioned to be a big ad play,” said Vernon in a statement.

Mpire, the parent company of WidgetBucks, scored $10 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Ignition Partners and others last June. At the time of the funding, the company said it had about 20,000 small publishers using the advertising widgets.

Last week, the company introduced a new product called YieldSense in order to maximize the performance of the online ad widgets.

Since leaving aQuantive, Vernon has been playing around in the Seattle startup community. He served as CFO of Global Market Insite and ZenZui.

aQuantive cultivated a lot of online advertising talent in Seattle, so it will be interesting to see if that employee base can help grow the next generation of online advertising companies. aQuantive co-founder Nick Hanauer joined the board of Marchex in 2007, while former CEO Brian McAndrews recently left Microsoft which fueled some speculation about his next move.