Digitas: Widgets are better than mobile

Don't forget about mobile, but concentrate on widgets. That is the thought behind a recent report about interactive agency Digitas. According to the company widgets are catching on much faster with advertisers while mobile platforms are still marginalized.

by Kristina Knight

According to Digitas more than 40% of North American users were exposed to widgets in April. That is more than 80 million individual users. In June comScore released the first metrix service to track widgets. In addition to the numbers for North American users, 24% of Western European users were exposed to widgets, nearly 11% of Asia/Pacific users were exposed to widgets and 17% of Latin American users were exposed to widgets.

Those kinds of numbers cannot be ignored. It also can't be ignored that most widgets are displayed on social networking platforms - blogs, vlogs and photo-sharing sites.

Widget creator Slide provided widgets seen by the most users (117 million) while RockYou widgets were seen 80 million users. In third for most widgets was PictureTrail with 30.6 million users.

By comparison, mobile numbers are very good, too. However, there are still more users overall logging on to the Internet via their computer than via their mobile device. Therefore, widgets have a larger consumer base, making them a better choice - at least for now - for marketers.