First Widget Statistics
Note: The Weekly Lijit stats email falsely reported that Feedburner was the most popular widget. This was true in our first pass but after subsequent filtering Google emerged as the top widget. Sorry this stat did not get changed in the email. -Stan
Newsweek declared 2007 to be “The Year of the Widget” For all this widget talk there are precious few numbers. What widgets are popular? What is the distribution within widget verticals?
Our Lijit spiders look at a lot of blogs as they assemble all the content for our user’s searches. In our last release we added some code to take a look at what widgets are running around out there in the wild blogosphere, and now we’ve got some numbers. Due to some technical problems we had to throw out a lot of data but we’ve got ten thousand blogs in this crawl. That’s a still a small sample so these numbers should be taken with a heaping serving of salt. However, even through all that sodium we can see some clear trends.
Our first graph shows the top 50 widgets, ordered by the percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. We see the classic power-curve (aka long tail) shape, with Google the clear leader.
Next, check out the widget popularity by the type of widget, the “vertical”. We see that bloggers clearly want to know about their readers, even more than they want to monetize those readers. They are also very interested in knowing what other people are linking to them. “Ecosystem” refers to widgets that identify a blog as being part of a group, for cross promotional purposes and such.
Within each vertical we can examine the breakdown between the competing widget providers. Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widgets from the vertical. Contrast this with the numbers below each chart which show the percentage widget distribution among all blogs which contain a widget from the vertical. This distinction is important because many blogs will use use multiple widgets of the same type. This is especially clear for advertising widgets where 90% of all blogs with ads use AdWords, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 75% of all advertising widgets. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, we can see that 47% of Analytics widgets do not appear alone.
Analytics
| google-analytics.com | 3264 | 56.18% |
| sitemeter.com | 1822 | 31.36% |
| statcounter.com | 1317 | 22.67% |
| feedburner.com | 1003 | 17.26% |
| quantserve.com | 402 | 6.92% |
| hittail.com | 136 | 2.34% |
| performancing.com | 136 | 2.34% |
| 103bees.com | 107 | 1.84% |
| blogflux.com | 82 | 1.41% |
| measuremap.com | 81 | 1.39% |
| bravenet.com | 78 | 1.34% |
| getclicky.com | 68 | 1.17% |
| reinvigorate.net | 49 | 0.84% |
| histats.com | 44 | 0.76% |
| 8589 | 147.83% |
Advertising
| googlesyndication.com | 2431 | 90.14% |
| blogads.com | 428 | 15.87% |
| adbrite.com | 142 | 5.27% |
| glam.com | 88 | 3.26% |
| fmpub.net | 61 | 2.26% |
| b5media.com | 54 | 2.00% |
| doubleclick.net | 47 | 1.74% |
| 3251 | 120.54% |
Trackbacks
| technorati.com | 1690 | 92.00% |
| haloscan.com | 249 | 13.55% |
| wholinked.com | 44 | 2.40% |
| 1983 | 107.95% |
Search
| snap.com | 528 | 48.26% |
| google.com | 423 | 38.67% |
| lijit.com | 119 | 10.88% |
| sphere.com | 67 | 6.12% |
| eurekster.com | 54 | 4.94% |
| 1191 | 108.87% |
*The numbers for Lijit skew high as our search used Lijit users’ blogs as seeds to begin the crawl (Before we had to throw out most of the blog data as invalid.).
Notes and Conclusions
These statistics are based on a crawl of 8552 blogs done over April 11-15, 2007. This crawl was “centered” on blogs with the Lijit widget (or as we call it, Wijit), and expanded outwards by following the blogrolls. Due to some bugs in how we stored this data, we had to throw out a large number of blogs. These stats only include numbers which we are sure to be correct. This is our first time, after all! For this sample we take a wide definition of widgets, including non-visible widgets such as as Google Analytics. Also note that we do not include image-only widgets, this includes the Feedburner subscriber count badge and the LinkedIn badge. Also not included are “widgets” that are automatically added by a blogging platform, like those from Blogger or Typepad. Because our crawl expanded outwards by blogrolls, and because of the general disconnect between the traditional blogosphere and social networks, widgets from sites like MySpace are not included in these stats.
In the coming weeks we will crawl again and again and continue to iterate these stats. Watch this blog to for further updates.