I-COM worldmeasurementnews

Don't spoil your widget campaign

David Smith writes for iMedia: One of the greatest challenges faced by marketers surrounds widget audience measurement. While there is not a whole lot that isn’t measureable within the widget itself, tracking it across the internet poses a challenge due to the fact that audience measurement tends to take place at the publisher or widget-serving platform level.

A further challenge is that the metrics used for traditional digital display advertising are not necessarily appropriate. Impressions and page views are secondary to usage, interaction (actions and time spent), total embeds active at a certain time, average “lifespan,” and transmission to others. Current metric offerings do not adequately address these key measures. More...

Measuring The Virality Of Widgets

Jodi McDermott writes in Mediapost: Virality can be used to describe the efficacy in distribution for widgets, social applications, email and your traditional word-of-mouth marketing. When it comes to widgets specifically, virality boils down to the number of times that a widget is grabbed from a source and installed to a destination, such as a social networking profile, blog, desktop or Web site page. There are several components to measuring virality....More...

Facebook Adopts New Metric for Widgets

Brandweek reports: Facebook took a step toward standardizing the wild world of Web metrics by switching its engagement rating for applications from reporting daily usage to measuring monthly active users. The social networking site announced the change last week via a company blog aimed at an audience of developers. The goal is to help developers focus on "longer-term engagement" and show them "the number of users who visit [their] application over a longer time frame than just one day," according to Facebook. More...

Clearspring Becomes First Widget Network to Receive ABCi Accreditation

Clearspring writes: Clearspring Technologies Inc., the leading widget syndication and tracking service, has been independently audited and accredited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Interactive (ABCi). Clearspring is the first widget platform to complete an ABCi audit, highlighting the company's commitment to accurate tracking and reporting metrics and to meeting the industry's requirement for independent, third party accreditation.

The What, Why, Where and How of Widget Metrics

Jodi McDermott writes: My good friends Ivan Pope and Jim Sterne hosted the WidgetWebExpo conference this week in New York. My portion of the presentation focused on widget analytics and Albert’s focused on measuring Social Applications. This was one of the first conferences that I have ever been to that was 100% focused on widgets - an interesting venue when everyone in the audience is actually focused on widget analytics and measurement. The topic of the panel was “The What, Why, Where and How of Widget Metrics.” More...

List of companies that measure widget measurement or metrics

Jeremiah Owyang writes: I’m watching more closely the movement within the widget industry, it’s growing quickly, and we expect 2008 to have some serious growth from this market. Expect widget advertising networks to appear this year, and as a result, the need to measure and watch this distributed industry is important. Here’s a list of companies that measure widget network growth.

Widget Analytics Meets Widget Audience Measurement

Jodi McDermott writes in Mediapost: ComScore's attention to tracking Web widgets is a big step towards the adoption of widget monetization. Advertisers relying on third-party audience measurement firms to validate audience and engagement have been waiting for the inclusion of widgets to provide justification to their social network marketing strategies. While some advertisers have already been testing the market with widget monetization, the validation of this market by a firm like comScore will help boost its growth and the maturation of the measurement tools and platforms needed to support these business models.

The advertising channels that have recently emerged to support the monetization of widgets boil down to two areas, Widgets as ads & In-widget ad networks. More....

What's a Widget Worth?

BusinessWeek writes Software developers say their impact is being underrepresented; comScore hopes a new measurement tool will paint a clearer picture.

Online social networks will continue to grab the attention of Web users and the advertisers who want to reach them in 2008, but some software developers who help make the networks popular say they're missing out on the spoils.

Social sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Google's Orkut could crack $1 billion in ad sales by year's end. Yet makers of the so-called "widget" software, whose programs have helped propel the networks' growth, have yet to see much of that revenue, in part because of a lack of reliable data about how many people use their products. "There are a huge amount of page views in social networking, but no one's figured out how to monetize them properly," says Duncan Davidson, a venture partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, which invests in News Corp.'s MySpace and smaller social networks Multiply, FanIQ, and Bluepulse. "It's still an experiment."

WHO'S USING WHAT WIDGETS?
Market researcher comScore (SCOR) wants to end the mystery. Considered by many to be the industry standard for audience tracking on the Web, comScore will use a revamped yardstick that could give advertisers, software makers, and investors a better handle on just how many people are using the programs. Under the new method of calculating, almost 586 million individual Internet users viewed a piece of widget software in November, 2007, according to an exclusive look at the data comScore provided to BusinessWeek.com. That's nearly double comScore's estimate in July, the last month it measured using an old system. ComScore plans to release the new widget usage data in mid-January.

Widgets Craze In Full View

MediaPost writes AT OMMA'S WIDGET SESSION TRACK on Tuesday, executives from RockYou and Slide.com, two companies at the forefront of the widget craze, said their portable applications netted 90 million and 134 million unique monthly page views respectively (and Slide didn't even count Facebook users).
But when asked how many of those viewers had actually loaded the widget onto their page, the numbers dropped to about 15-20 million for RockYou, and 30 million for Slide--roughly one out of five for both companies. This distinction between page views and actual user engagement with widgets (and ultimately, the brands associated with them) was a focal point of the panel's discussion. More...