comScore adds Widget Metrix

Online measurement company comScore will now track embedded content on webpages, known as widgets, giving full credit to the websites that are serving it.

by Helen Leggatt

Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore, couldn’t believe her eyes when presented with recent figures that had been run on widgets. According to their measurements, 178 million people worldwide have viewed at least one.

Widgets became popular with MySpace members who use them to embelish their profile pages. More recently Facebook has begun to allow developers to create widgets for their members. Other sites, such as PhotoBucket, provide widget code that can easily be embedded in blogs and social sites.

By tracking widgets comScore can now track what content people are looking at and not just the page. While site visitors may be viewing a MySpace profile, they may well be watching PhotoBucket content, via a widget, and comScore’s new Widget Metrix will now measure that widget usage.

slide%20logo.gif According to comScore's analysis of the top ten Web widgets worldwide, photo-related widgets were the most popular. The top widget provider, Slide, was shown to have a worldwide reach of over 117 million unique viewers, that’s nearly 14 percent of the total world internet audience. RockYou came in second with 82 million viewers, then PictureTrail with 31 million and PhotoBucket came in fourth with 28 million viewers.

"The reach that widgets have is gong to surprise a lot of people," said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. "What advertisers are ultimately interested in is what are people looking at, not what page ... and our index showed we have 60% more 18- to 24-year-olds than average internet property."