In North America alone in April, 81 million widget users in some way saw or interacted with a widget. That's 40.3 percent of all Internet users on the continent.
It has become so pervasive that comScore now had dedicated a widget tracking service to measure their usage. At this time comScore only measures online widgets, it doesn't track the desktop ones.
For the overall world, widgets reached 177 million online users, which is 21 percent of everyone online. This is coming about from the growing user-generated content phenomenon.
Now that widgets are everywhere, creators are starting to think of ways to monetize them. They're facing the same problem that video sites like YouTube (GOOG) are facing, in that they don't want to alienate users through implementing an ad model - evem though they know they must.
The measurements by comScore are a big step toward helping widget creators find the best way to do it. Kevin Freedman, chief financial officer at Slide says, "Measurement is really going to shine a light on our young and attractive audience for advertisers."
In other words, the first step is defining audience. From there widget-based businesses can launch campaigns built around demographics.
This is going to going to be one more platform in the seemingly endless fragmentation of the market. We're not even to the spot of knowing the best way to monetize online video yet. The answer seems to be that there is more than one answer. Professional content can offer longer form advertising, while user-generated content still is best with short-form advertising.
Whatever is found out, the move toward monetizing widgets is about to begin. It's just a matter of the first rounds of the results of the measuring being made known, and using that data to make the decisions on what avenue to take. More than likely it will be multifaceted.
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