Don’t write-off the widget yet!
January 16th, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe
I’ve recently picked up on widget-fatigue within the industry, and a sense that they are no longer worth shouting about.
Jemima Kiss at the Guardian recently posted a Tweet about yet another widget: “A press release about the launch of Facebook app. Bless them. That will be the 11,000th, then…”
But to put widgets in perspective, they are still having a phenomenal influence on internet traffic.
Photobucket replaced Flickr as the largest photo sharing site in the UK last February, and it has managed to hold onto that no.1 position largely due to 55% of its traffic coming from widgets and applications on MySpace and Bebo. By comparison, Flickr only gets 2.4% of its traffic from social networking sites. (Data from Hitwise).
Interestingly, Photobucket saw a significant jump in widget adoption when they stopped calling them widgets and started calling them slideshows. This is old news and has been widely reported already, but worth reiterating I felt.
So maybe the problem rests with the name…but ultimately, widgets are still proving to be hugely successful traffic drivers.
Technorati tags: widget, photobucket, flickr, facebook, myspace, twitter
