Widget developers take note. If you weren’t certain the development time for a widget would be worthwhile or not the numbers are in. Google has released the daily rendering numbers of Google gadgets. To see the numbers for an individual gadget go to the Gadgets For Your Webpage directory. So far, there are no aggregated lists showing the popularity ranks of various widgets. I suspect that Google will add them in time; I also suspect that someone else will write a script to scrape the pageviews and make their own Google Gadgets popularity ranking site (when you do, put the URL in the comments).
It’s interesting to see what scale these pageviews operate at. Here’s a survey of the views for gadgets:
- Google Map – 4,861,113
- PacMan v2.0 – 8,114,344
- DIGG – 3,228,599
- My IP – 1,063,244
- Wikipedia – 27,314,972
- Countdown – 2,076,028
- Online Second Life Friends – 1,396
- Free Sudoku Puzzles – 4,450,349
- Memory Game – 647,151
Games, reference, and location are big, but there is definitely a long tail out there. The numbers aren’t exact. Here’s the disclaimer:
These numbers are approximations, representing the number of times each gadget is rendered across all places Google Gadgets can be viewed [Brady Note:List from Google – “Google Personalized Homepage, Google Pages, Blogger, Google Desktop, and across thousands of independent pages around the web”]. The pageview count is aggregated weekly to smooth out the normal daily fluctuations and we have filtered out automatic page refreshes. Individual gadget authors who want to know more specific information about their gadget’s traffic should make use of the Google Analytics library.
So why is this interesting? If you are a gadget owner this is a good way to get competitive intelligence, not a good way to track your pageviews (though I guess it could also be a lazy person’s analytics package). For potential gadget creators this is a good way to validate how popular your widget might be. Assuming that you are able to promote it; the gadgets your comparing will have first-mover advantage. Me, I just like it when Google reveals even a fraction of what they know.