Social Media Now: How Big is Your Widget?
May 11, 2007 by Jason Chervokas
Several pieces this morning got me thinking about the size and scale of the widget business. First, Matt Marshall at Venture Beat wrote about Slide–maker of a web slide show widget:
Slide, the maker of a Web slide show feature, has emerged as a major player, boasting 150 million daily slide show views and more than 200,000 new slide show “widgets” created daily.
These numbers are astonishing, and are enough to make it the largest “independent” widget company on the web, according to the company. It is a striking example of how quickly you can grow if you have a good, simple idea.
Techcrunch too touted Slide as well as a competitor called Flektor, hyping their value based on traffic numbers and the recently reported $300 million price that MySpace has agreed to pay to acquire Photobucket:
The new kid on the slide show block is Flektor. It just recently came out of beta and has few users so far, but we’re hearing they are getting a lot of attention from potential acquirors.
Does Michael Arrington get a finders fee? I find myself frustrated by Techcrunch when its tone become so unremittingly promotional, for example: “Flektor is brand new and doesn’t have the capitalization complications of the older startups. My bet (and rumors around the valley back this up) is they may be acquired in the next six months by one of the social networks, perhaps one of the up and comers looking for as many tools as possible to compete with MySpace.” Buy now! Tickets going fast!
By contrast Fred Wilson threw a bit of a wet blanket onto widget traffic numbers, writing about Clearspring, which claims to be serving 60 million content widgets a day. Fred, who is one of the most knowledgeable and thoughtful investors I know, doesn’t doubt Clearspring’s numbers, but he does wonder out loud about the way we measure widgets:
But before we start putting Clearspring in McDonald’s territory (billions served), let’s get something straight. Serving widgets generates huge numbers quickly.All you need to do is look at Photobucket, Slide, and RockYou’s numbers for their photo/slideshow widgets to see how powerful the widget model is. I don’t have access to the actual numbers for these three photo widget services and I’d prefer not to print the rumors I’ve heard, but I’d venture a guess that their numbers for widgets served each day will make Clearspring’s 3bn number look tiny.
I do know the numbers for FeedBurner’s widgets and they are well north of what Clearspring is serving. But this post is not about whose you know what is bigger than whose.
It’s about the challenge of understanding what is what in the widget market.
The Internet has long promised to be the most measurable media platform ever, but despite the plethora of metrics that exist–heck, perhaps because of the plethora of metrics that exist– no universally-accepted, bullet-proof, third-party standards exists to allow apples to apples comparisons between one Internet property and another, never mind between one widget company and another.
This babel of measurement is only exacerbated by the distributed nature of widget traffic. From Fred again:
Are those 18mm uniques that are attributed to Photobucket being seen on Photobucket.com? Or are those 18mm uniques the number of people that are being exposed to the Photobucket widget wherever it is being embedded (MySpace, Beebo, etc). I don’t know the answer to that simple question, but it’s an important one.
And what’s the right number to look at? Should Photobucket get credit for having an audience that sees its widget on other services pages? When that page includes five to ten other widgets? Or should it just get credit for those who interact with the widget in some way?
There’s no doubt that the widget business could benefit from a third party measurement that every party could trust. Perhaps the measurement system should be multi-tiered–measuring total traffic, number of widgets distributed, traffic at the point of distribution, and click-through rates (to the extent that a widget is actionable).
Would widget makers welcome such a system? It seems to me that for the moment the dearth of real measurement benefits widget-makers by inflating the value of their products. But a widget to measure widgets–that would have some real value.
Link Love:
Chinese Social Net 51.com Secures $10 Million In Second Round
Last.fm Adds Personalized Music Anywhere Widget
Facebook Marketplace: The Alternatives
Lots of blather on the Net this morning about Facebook’s new free classified ad offering. Here’s a different take that looks at competitors from an end-user’s perspective
Meanwhile, the biggest traffic puller on Wordpress is reputedly a blog featuring an endless stream of photos of cats…It’s not, as you say, the size of your audience - it’s whether any of them actually interact with you, let alone generate any income.
And, yes, Techcrunch does read a little bit like a stream of press releases at times, right down to (disclosure:…) statements.
[...] In an article from Social Media Club entitled “How Big Is Your Widget”, Jason Chervokas writes about the size and scale of the burgeoning widget business. He questions the much hyped traffic statistics boasted by Clearspring, Slide, and Photobucket and concludes: [...]
[...] Suppose your team have just finished working feverishly to implement “Virus-a-Go-Go”, your new Facebook widget that is guaranteed to soar to the top of the charts. You launch it, and sure enough you were right. Zillions of hits are suddenly raining down on your new widget. [...]