Some Thoughts on Widget Distribution

I’ve been thinking a lot about widget distribution recently.  About stuff like the importance of making your widget grabbable from the body of the widget itself, and the success that MyBlogLog had in translating widget placement with a few prominent bloggers into massive blogger adoption.

One of the obvious distribution channels available to widget publishers is through the various widget galleries that have emerged in the past several months: specifically, Widgetbox, Snipperoo, Musestorm (though it's not their main gig), and now Widgipedia.  You also have to include the online Start Pages in this group – at least those that offer exportable widgets, like PageFlakes and YourMinis.

Logically, it would follow that the distribution potential of each service depends on the size of each service’s user base.  Here is a snapshot from Compete.com of the primary widget galleries:

I think it’s safe to say that as of now, none of the widget galleries has received much mainstream adoption.  I would venture a guess that most of those visiting these services currently are widget publishers, not consumers.

Now let’s look at the online start pages.  I’ve included Netvibes in this group, as they will no doubt be enabling exportable widgets soon:

There seems to be a little more traction here and some nice growth curves, but still not a lot of traction.  Also, it should be noted that Compete tracks only US traffic, and Netvibes is apparently strongest in non-US markets.

Granted, it’s still pretty early in both of these spaces, and Compete is known to undercount the audiences of these types of services.  I also expect that these services will begin to see more traction – they are all funded, and run by smart people.  But even if you multiply these monthly visitor numbers by three, even the best widgets aren’t going to be exposed to that many folks.

So what does this mean for the widget publishers who are working on their distribution strategies?  For one, if your site’s user base is comparable or larger than the user bases of these widget galleries, I would prioritize pushing your widgets internally over getting set up on the widget galleries. 

One other point on widget distribution priorities.  The other day, Nick Gonzalez on TechCrunch posted partial daily traffic numbers.  Using daily traffic distribution from RateItAll, I would estimate that on this particular Thursday, the 25K visits received by TechCrunch through hour 8 represents about ¼ of TechCrunch’s daily visits.  If you assume that this was a “normal” Thursday for TechCrunch and that the monthly daily average is pretty close to the 100K that we can project for a Thursday, we can deduce that TechCrunch gets about 3M visits a month.

Of the 3M or so monthly visits that I project TechCrunch to get, I am going to take a shot in the dark and say that the unique visitor number is about 60% of that – let’s say 1.8M.  And this analysis doesn’t even include those that are reading TechCrunch via feed, who would also be exposed to a widget by a mention on TechCrunch.

Granted, TechCrunch is far bigger than most blogs.  But I would wager that there are a fair number of tech bloggers on the Web that have a larger readership than any of the start pages or widget galleries discussed here.  These blogs also have the benefit of being concentrated traffic - just about every visitor to a blog would be exposed to a prominently placed widget, not to mention a widget that was written up.

I'll let folks draw their own conclusions about what this might mean for widget distribution strategies.

Comments

[Ed Anuff]

Lawrence,

I like your analysis of the traffic data, and I fully agree with you that widgets should be "grabbable" in order to spur viral adoption. We do automatically provide "Get this widget" links for all the widgets we syndicate, including our recently launched Blidgets, although there were some issues with these not being included if you used the advanced placement option which we've now fixed. The key advantage to our model, though, is that we’re also able to make the widget subscriber aware of other widgets they might be interested in based on the aggregate widget data we collect across over 20,000 web sites we syndicate widgets to, as well as the feedback we gather in the form of ratings and reviews. This lets us help new widgets get into circulation much more quickly.

Ed

Widgetbox
http://www.widgetbox.com

[Yan]

You don't have to guess techcruch traffic. They have a sitemeter link with public account. Here is direct link to the stats:

http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s26techcrunch

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