Widget Statistics

Lijit have been crawling sites that have instlled their 'Wijit' and bring us the first pass at some very interesting Widget Statistics.

These statistics are based on a crawl of 8552 blogs done over April 11-15, 2007. This crawl was "centered" on blogs with the Lijit widget (or as we call it, Wijit), and expanded outwards by following the blogrolls. Due to some bugs in how we stored this data, we had to throw out a large number of blogs. These stats only include numbers which we are sure to be correct. This is our first time, after all! For this sample we take a wide definition of widgets, including non-visible widgets such as as Google Analytics. Also note that we do not include image-only widgets, this includes the Feedburner subscriber count badge and the LinkedIn badge. Also not included are "widgets" that are automatically added by a blogging platform, like those from Blogger or Typepad. Because our crawl expanded outwards by blogrolls, and because of the general disconnect between the traditional blogosphere and social networks, widgets from sites like MySpace are not included in these stats.

Although (as Lijit themselves say), these numbers need to be taken with a pinch or two of salt, it does give us a breakdown of the relative popularity of widget categories. As Lijit say, it looks like bloggers are more interested in knowing who visited their site than they are in earning money from them. I'd say there are many more types of widget out there - but at least Lijit understand that there are 'invisible' widgets such as ad codes that count in the mix. Take a look at the full site to see specific widget producers in the rankings and for breakdowns of the categories. Congratulations to Lijit for this, and we look forward to further updates.