Lijit

It has been a while since the last widget statistics. But we have good news! Derek and Daniel have now automated the process and we will be running results on a weekly basis. Over time, this will give us a clear picture of the ebb and flow of widget popularity. Let us know if there are other statistics you would like included in these weekly runs.

Number of blogs examined: 48,189
Blogs with widget of any sort: 31,953
Total number of widget installations found: 247,121
Survey period: 9/26/2007 - 10/16/2007

Overall Popularity

Below are the top 50 widget providers, ordered by the percentage of blogs which contain at least one widget from the provider. Once again we see the classic power-curve (aka long tail) shape, with Google the clear leader.

*Note that “tinyurl.com” is actually a cloaked reference to PayPerPost.com.

Popularity by Vertical

Below are the popularity of widgets within the top verticals. Note that each pie graph represents the percentage widget distribution among all widget objects 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 92% of all blogs with ads use at least one AdWords widget, yet the AdWords widget accounts for only 83% of all advertising widgets found. The degree of overlap can be estimated by how far the percentage totals go over 100%. For example, in Analytics you can see that the percent total comes to 147%, indicating that 47% of Analytics widget appear with a competitor’s.

Analytics

Advertising

Search

Trackbacks

Video

Our survey is focused on widgets that are permanent fixtures on a blog, not those that are embedded in posts. However, our crawler makes a note of widgets found in front-page posts, and these are primarily video widgets. Here is a graph of relative popularity of video widgets in blog posts.

Methodology

Our definition of “widget” is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.

• “Functionality” includes analytics widgets. These add functionality for the blogger but are invisible to visitors.
• “Regularly occurring” excludes widgets embedded in posts, such as YouTube and Dailymotion videos. (We do collect statistics on these, however. The final chart of this post shows the results.) Widgets that occur on all posts, such as the “Digg This” widget, are included.
• “Voluntarily” excludes widgets automatically added by the blog hosting platform. We are only interested in widgets that bloggers make an effort to install.
• Image-based badges, such as FeedBurner subscriber counts, are not counted. HTML forms, such as the original Google search boxes, are also not counted. We may include support for these in the future.

Our crawl is “centered” on blogs with our Lijit widget. (Or as we call it, the Lijit Wijit). Our crawler then expands outwards by following blogrolls. This may give a bias to the overall results.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under widget statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.