Widget Statistics Revival
It has been a really long time since we last updated the widget statistics. Due to popular demand, they are back. Our hope is to be a bit more consistent with our widget stats posts. You may notice some changes since the last post we did on this topic, some subtle, some drastic.
Overall, we see the same general patterns we have seen in the past. The main differences are some of the widget adoption gains for certain services. I have attempted to highlight these below. One other theme appears to be the overall widget adoption numbers. Based on our analysis, these numbers have doubled in certain circumstances. This really highlights the growth in widget popularity amongst our sampled blogs.
Number of blogs examined: 47,378
Blogs with widget of any sort: 37,281
Total number of widget installations found: 1,200,928
Survey period: 9/26/2007 - 2/12/2008
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. There are some movers though. Services such as del.icio.us, twitter, and the ever popular LIJIT , have increased in popularity. There were also significant gains from MyBlogLog and ning .
*Note that “tinyurl.com” is actually a cloaked reference to PayPerPost.com.
Popularity by Vertical
The items to pay attention to here are “social network” and “search” . Both of these categories have edged above “trackbacks” . The largest change evident here is the increase in the popularity of search. Search popularity has gone from 9% to 21% since the last time we reported.
Widget Popularity
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. 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 151%, indicating that 51% of Analytics widgets 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 the relative popularity of video widgets in blog posts.
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.