Widgets were all the rage last year. And the trend seems to be growing. Widgetbox, a widget creation and distribution platform, is reporting 500 million impressions worldwide in the past month, according to Quantcast. Widgetbox says that the vast majority of activity exists across hundreds of thousands of publishers who embed the widgets in blogs each month and through partners who integrate Widgetbox’s widget galleries.
That being said, Widgetbox is still behind other widget makers in the space, including competitor RockYou, which had 9.5 billion impressions in the past month, according to Quantcast. Clearspring also seems to have more of a reach than Widgetbox, but we don’t have the comparable Quantcast numbers. Clearspring’s widgets had 520 million unique visitors in April of 2009, according to comScore.
We also received these comScore numbers of uniques for April 2009 for most of the widget producing platforms:
Widgetbox, provides tools for both novice and advanced developers to create a variety of widgets, from simple embeddable RSS feed readers (called “blidgets”) to full social network applications for Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others. Although Facebook represents only 1% of the widget maker’s traffic, Widgetbox says that they are specifically targeting Facebook as a growing priority, recently launching Facebook Connect integration for users and widgets (which can be published in the Facebook feed). Perhaps this is because of Facebook’s steady growth in the U.S. and its popularity abroad.
Last fall, Widgetbox launched a blog network. To be part of the network, a blog owner needs to embed one of the 29 channel-specific widgets created by Widgetbox. Each widget displays the same leaderboard content as the Widgetbox homepage, which allows users to browse through a network’s top blogs without having to frequently return to the Widgetbox site. The majority of Widgetbox’s impressions come from blogging platforms Blogger and Wordpress, with a fair amount of traffic also coming from Bebo and MySpace.
While Widgetbox is seeing success as a startup, it is competing in a crowded space of other more popular widget makers, including Rockyou, Clearspring, and Slide.
“Widgetbox, a widget creation and distribution platform, is reporting 500 impressions worldwide in the past month, according to Quantcast.”
- 500…?
500 million impressions and 100 million uniques as tracked by Quantcast (our internal monthly widget numbers are ~700m impressions).
We actually broke the 100 million mark today!
wow ..
the #s don’t mean shit, how many people actually use it, instead of ignoring it as an annoying useless “feature”.
its like the techcrunch crunchboard widgit, sure it might have millions of impressions, but the actual # of people actually “using” it is probably a few hundred people
In the case of Mochi Media, it’s 100%!
Same as any widget company that claims huge #’s of uniques.. when in reality, it is just something loading on the corner of a page, that nobody notices or uses.
All marketing.. sad really
Sound like Widgetbox is growing fast – 60MM users in April to 100MM for month to date June. Congrats Widgetbox!
Thanks Tom!
Are you profitable?
Widgets man, whod’a thunk?
Oh, I get it. Roman numerals. 500M now means 500,000. Last time I checked we called that 500K in techy-land.
The table is obviously in K already you moron. Go back to your VBScript.
Very impressive numbers and a cool service. Widgets are a great way of sharing rich interactive data on blogs and social networks. Now a days any blog I visit I some kind of widget. Produle is one more company that makes shareable widgets.
Leena your link to quancast is wrong. Hope it’s not the password
Hmmm… interesting choice for a little featurette of a platform that, along with the other competitor shouted out (when you look at the leader board in the piece) are both clearly way back in the pack.
Anybody else detect a faint whiff of ‘paid placement’ to this dedicated choice of editorial inches?… just asking.
We certainly need to continue to believe there remains a nice big fat bright line at TC between the ad and content side of your business.
I like LabPixies’ FloodIt mobile widget and I’m addicted I’m afraid to their sedoko web gadget!
The design is really flawless and we play it accross our office daily.
Here’s the link – http://www.labp..._page.php?id=53
That’s a lot of widgets!
How about some quantities on these numbers??? 75 what? 9 what?
“While Widgetbox is seeing success as a startup…”
Can we please start defining “success” as “earning revenue at a rate and sustainability that will result in profitability at some point”.
The definition of success used in the article, which seems to be “their widgets get lots of impressions” is, while not quite meaningless, pretty close. Are either the publishers or audience for those widget impressions every going to be willing to pay for them? If so, how much? How much revenue would these impressions then translate to?
I would have thought that one lesson learned from during the past year is that startups, with very few exceptions (Twitter) cannot continue to point to metrics such as “reach”, “impressions”, “views”, “users”, etc as being proof of their revenue model. Yes, indeed, all you widget makers out there, it is time to “show us the money”.
People are in love with their “impressions” and “reach”.. even when they consume huge amounts of $$ to stay in business and generate *NO* revenue.,