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i think this is a good step in measuring widgets and giving advertisers and publishers a better understanding of their reach. however, i only hope to see more widget metrics that go beyond the pageviews and unique visitors to really show who and what visitors are actually using the widgets. i come across many small and large sites daily having 5 or more widgets on the page, of which i might look at or interact with one. yet, each of the widgets track me as a unique viewer. it's one thing to be on a popular page and incur a unique visitor to your widget stat, it's another thing entirely for the visitor to take notice of the widget or interact with it.

If I get one more email from someone bragging about the millions of Facebook users they've got using their app, I am going to declare bankruptcy again. What I want to know is what apps are people actually using.

Comments (7) | Posted June 15, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Amen! I had the exact same response, just with a little more venom, because I first read about the Widget Metrix release in the VentureBeat post entitled Slide pounds chest: Widget used by 14 percent of internet population. Note that the "unique viewers" that is comScore's current widget metric was accidentally transformed into "users" in the post title. A small, but very important change.

As I said in my post, it's unsettling to me how easy it is for an intelligent, thoughtful person to mentally transform widget viewers into widget users without even realizing that they did so. However we end up defining widget "use," it certainly isn't going to be "loading a Web page that happens to have some embedded flash on it."

Posted by: W.B. McNamara | Jun 15, 2007 11:16:55 AM

LinkedInABox is a new one that I am trying out. Extends the closed site onto my platform (aka my blog). Seems like there is a ton to put out there. As to what folks are interacting with thats another question. Interestingly, my blogroll seems to be one of the most clicked areas of my site. MyBlogLog is also pretty well used.

Posted by: Jesse Chenard | Jun 15, 2007 11:53:35 AM

W.B., great article on the subtle change from unique viewer to user... I agree with your summation that what we need is something more. Something that reflects actual usage, or "engagement" of the widget.

When you get a chance, take a look at the widget reporting we've released recently on yourminis.com. We've added a report we call, "interactions" which is exactly what you describe. It tracks when a user physically uses a widget for that widget view (maximum once per view).

We still offer the classic views, unique viewers, and trend values. But we believe it is the "interactions" tracking that reveals the true measurement of how many users are actually using a widget.

I think its only a matter of time before advertisers and publishers in the widget community become aware of the inadequacies of web 1.0 style analytics being applied to an entirely new and different set of web content.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this...

---
BTW, if you want to quickly check out the reporting, you can simply create an account, create a blog widget or remix an existing widget, and then view the reports from your widget dashboard.

Posted by: Jeremy | Jun 15, 2007 1:44:03 PM

Ha! That's the exact question I asked @ the dev evening for Facebook.

Sure, tons of people added random apps, but do people actually DO something with them? Same for widgets.

Posted by: Anthony V | Jun 15, 2007 5:37:46 PM

Hey Jeremy -

I'll definitely take a look at yourminis.com this weekend, and get in touch -- it's excellent to see people thinking and working on this!

- Whit

Posted by: W.B. McNamara | Jun 15, 2007 6:06:15 PM

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Posted by: aizheng | Jun 16, 2007 5:25:08 AM

Fred, Jeremy, and Whit, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I've also been thinking about analytics in a platform world and think that there's a lot more that needs to be learned about platform app engagement than just comScore "widget views"...look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Posted by: Justin Smith | Jun 16, 2007 3:05:48 PM

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