In April, Lijit published what we thought were the first Widget stats. Last month, comScore published their “Widget Metrix”, a new service they have started to track the usage of widgets across the Web. The data was interesting – and very different – as the two methodologies were different (Lijit is looking at it from the publisher point of view; comScore is looking at it from the visitor point of view.) Both approaches are important indicators of both widget growth and popularity.
Lijit just published their June Widget Statistics. They are tuning their algorithm – the crawler now includes 29,139 blogs and the definition of a 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.
Based on the June crawl, the top 10 most popular widgets on blogs are: google-analytics, sitemeter, googlesyndication, technorati, statcounter, mybloglog, blogrolling, feedburner, haloscan, and truthlaidbear. The analytics widgets still dominate (over 50% of blogs) with ads and trackbacks on about 20% of all blogs.
I expect both the comScore Widget Metrix and the Lijit Widget statistics to rapidly evolve over the next few quarters as both absolute and trend data become richer, the sample sizes continue to expand, and the methodologies become more evolved.