Some of the best data on the growth of social networks is coming out
of the widget startups.
People put widgets on their various social
network user pages, and traffic is referred back to the widget
companies. Other than policy changes
that can have a significant impact on widget usage, it is the best
traffic data available outside of the social networks themselves.
What I’m hearing from some of those widget companies is that San Francisco-based Hi5,
already a big network and rumored to be quite profitable, is surging. Traffic is up 15% month over month, and Hi5 looks like it’s second
only to MySpace at this point. They are clearly bigger than all the second tier
social networks - Piczo, Bebo, Tagged, etc.”
The available third party data is mostly agreeing. Hi5 has a large
presence in the U.S., but the bulk of its usage is in other countries.
That may explain why Comscore, which puts them at the 79th largest
website based on 23 million worldwide unique visitors in December (just
ahead of Facebook, which is no. 83 overall), shows a declining U.S.
audience. U.S. uniques declined to 3 million in December, down from a
high of just over 4 million in July 2006. Hi5 claims to have 50 million
registered users, which sounds about right given the 23 million monthly
unique visitor number.
Alexa shows significant growth as well, although Compete has a different story, more closely mirroring Comscore’s U.S. data.
http://www.hairy-mail.com/social/message.swf

http://communityincontext.typepad.com/blog/
If you are seeding the widgets in communities in which the widget offer a relevant channel for them to get special access to content, sweepstakes and relevant news and or coupons you can begin to develop a number based upon the available community information.
But it is very important to explain that we cannot measure widgets with the same standards we do online display advertising. It should be looked at in a hybrid world of loyalty and rich media engagement.
When you take the CRM models you can only constitute the engagement behavior as piece of free media that your Most Valuable Customers, those with the highest LTV, are the fire starters for your brand. (think of them as the person on the train with a passion or virus who sneezes, it is that germ that spreads to three others and repeats the spread through other communities until you have a rampant virus)
Making sure that you are tracking posts, streams and entries to your widget is key to developing a metric that can prove ROI over the widgets life on the web.
http://communityincontext.typepad.com/blog/
http://communityincontext.typepad.com/blog/
If you are seeding the widgets in communities in which the widget offer a relevant channel for them to get special access to content, sweepstakes and relevant news and or coupons you can begin to develop a number based upon the available community information.
But it is very important to explain that we cannot measure widgets with the same standards we do online display advertising. It should be looked at in a hybrid world of loyalty and rich media engagement.
When you take the CRM models you can only constitute the engagement behavior as piece of free media that your Most Valuable Customers, those with the highest LTV, are the fire starters for your brand. (think of them as the person on the train with a passion or virus who sneezes, it is that germ that spreads to three others and repeats the spread through other communities until you have a rampant virus)
Making sure that you are tracking posts, streams and entries to your widget is key to developing a metric that can prove ROI over the widgets life on the web.
If you are seeding the widgets in communities in which the widget offer a relevant channel for them to get special access to content, sweepstakes and relevant news and or coupons you can begin to develop a number based upon the available community information.
But it is very important to explain that we cannot measure widgets with the same standards we do online display advertising. It should be looked at in a hybrid world of loyalty and rich media engagement.
When you take the CRM models you can only constitute the engagement behavior as piece of free media that your Most Valuable Customers, those with the highest LTV, are the fire starters for your brand. (think of them as the person on the train with a passion or virus who sneezes, it is that germ that spreads to three others and repeats the spread through other communities until you have a rampant virus)
Making sure that you are tracking posts, streams and entries to your widget is key to developing a metric that can prove ROI over the widgets life on the web.