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Gigya, today announced that, according to comScore, Gigya reached over 120 million unique widget users worldwide and over 44 million unique widget users in the United States in March 2008. This data was released earlier this month as part of comScore’s Widget Metrix Report.
Global Shifts in the Consumption of Content
Today’s Internet users want to consume content in the places they spend their time, and increasingly those places are social network pages, start pages, blogs and other user-controlled pages. As a result, an enormous amount of content is now being used and enjoyed away from its original source. According to a February 2008 Trend Market report published by Universal McCann, “Social networks, personalized homepages and search engines are becoming platforms for external content. Essentially they [are] becoming the way that consumers organize their Internet experience. All sites are making their content available for publishing elsewhere and widgets are a great way to package and keep control of the content published elsewhere.”
Gigya’s distribution technology is providing the infrastructure for this new phenomenon. Gigya helps publishers by giving them the tools they need to get their content – in the form of widgets – distributed widely through social networks and other platforms, and tracks associated activity. The auto-posting tool also empowers consumers by making it easy for them to grab and share content to their choice of more than 50 social networks, blogs, start pages, bookmarking sites and desktop platforms.
A Widget Advertising and Distribution Solution for Brand Advertisers
comScore also reports that a total of 604 million people, representing 65 percent of the worldwide Internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in March 2008. According to the IAB’s April 2008 report “User Generated Content, Social Media and Advertising,” UGC sites are projected to attract 101 million users in the U.S. and earn $4.3 billion in ad revenue by 2011. With such enormous reach, widgets are now a major focus for marketers looking to reach an audience of social media users in a contextually appropriate way.
