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Advertisers Start Your Widget Engines!

posted on June 13, 2007


The WSJ has a report (sub) on comScore’s latest study on the growth of web widgets.

Nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content in April made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites, according to data that Web-tracking firm comScore Inc. plans to release today.

The comScore study reveals that photo-sharing widgets are the most popular, with Slide dominating the widget market. However, Jeff Jarvis asks why YouTube is not included on the list…

I don’t understand why Brightcove is on the list but YouTube isn’t; they must be limiting the definition of the widget. As far as I’m concerned, it’s YouTube that spread embedding–thus, widgeting–across the web. I’d define a widget as any embedded content or functionality.

It seems that widgets are here to stay, now we just need to figure out how to use them for marketing purposes – beyond building backlinks.

Care to share your ideas on how widgets could be used for marketing?


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  • http://writetoright.com Cade @ Write To Right

    Let’s be honest…if it wasn’t for sites like Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube for teens and young adults then this wouldn’t have that type of growth. They spend countless devoted social hours towards their marketing. They are like lowly interns that work their butts off for them and they love every moment of it.

  • http://www.amwso.com Dave O.

    Widgets are really becoming hot in the affiliate marketing community. The Shareasale network, http://www.shareasale.com has a pretty nice widget making feature for merchants to make widgets available for affiliates to promote products. Popshops.com is another company focused on widgets for affiliate marketers. Lots of potential for promoting coupons, deals, hot products and all kinds of stuff.

  • http://www.thevanblog.com Steven Bradley

    Backlinks are certainly the way widgets have been promoted so far. Branding is another obvious use for them.

    If your business model in part has to do with people using your system then a widget that helps make that system easy to use would work well and help spread the reach of your system.

    That would seem to fit nicely with affiliate marketing where if you make it easy for people to join and use your affiliate program through a widget you should end up with more people joining and using your affiliate program.

  • http://dabble.com/blog mary hodder

    Hi,
    The interesting thing is that the widgets show total unique viewers at 177k. So to contrast, Youtube plays 100m videos a day, and 57% plus of their views happen off site. So.. at 57 million views a day, I’d say the comScore numbers are missing a lot.

    I don’t think their overall numbers can be trusted, if they make such glaring errors and leave out so many sites that experience far more widget use, such as Flickr, which are on thousands of blogs and must experience thousands of page views.

    mary

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