Tag Archives: Facebook

Popular in the US, but where are the UK widgets?

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While US newspaper websites appear to be going ‘widget’-crazy, there’s a distinct lack of the things this side of the pond.

The way the US sites are using these gadgets shows the breadth of news subjects they can be applied to:

These type of applications can sit on your desktop or feature on sites like Facebook, which now encourages outside software developers to design applications for its users. Answering this call, the Washington Post has developed political quiz application, The Compass, for use on the social networking site.

According to the AP article:

Jim Brady, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says widgets can boost a newspaper’s brand online, refer new readers back to the site and perhaps generate revenues through sponsorship deals.

Sounds like a plan.

Yet on a quick perusal, there don’t seem to be any on the UK’s newspaper sites. Why not?

Has anyone spotted any, anywhere?

‘Facebook Effect’ developing widgets boosts your site traffic

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Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, it’s all I ever hear. But could research from Quantcast finally have made the tangible link between the social site and others that news publishers were waiting to hear?

It claims that developing widgets for the site results in increasing site traffic for  those developing the apps – ‘The Facebook Effect’
“Quantcast found a common dramatic increase in traffic for those publishers that have built and deployed widgets (“applications”) on the Facebook platform.”

“Just six weeks into Facebook’s open platform initiative, we are seeing striking results,” said Konrad Feldman, co-founder and CEO, Quantcast Corporation. “The Facebook platform is driving substantial incremental traffic to application publishers’ Web sites, as consumers find new routes to exploring their wares.”

The Quantcast charts below (figures 1 and 2) reveal the relative growth in daily uniques to three leading widget publishers, each with multiple applications running on the Facebook platform. Since Facebook’s open platform initiative began on May 25th of this year:

  • Slide, the leading personal media network, has more than tripled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • Slide grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 312,000 to more than 1.1 million, an increase of 265 percent.
    • Slide grew global daily unique visitors from approximately 753,000 to more than 2.3 million, an increase of 207 percent.
  • HOTorNOT, an early leader in social media, has doubled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • HOTorNOT grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 182,000 to more than 350,000, an increase of 98 percent.
    • HOTorNOT grew global daily unique visitors from approximately 289,000 to more than 722,000, an increase of 152 percent.
  • RockYou, creator and distributor some of the most popular self-expression widgets on the Web, has more than tripled its global reach in Web site traffic.
    • RockYou grew domestic U.S. daily unique visitors from approximately 145,000 to more than 521,000, an increase of 228 percent.
    • RockYou tripled its global reach, increasing global unique visitors from approximately 286,000 to more than 1.3 million, an increase of 339 percent.

Figures 1 and 2 reveal the relative growth in daily unique visitors for domestic U.S. and Global audiences, respectively:

Facebookfig1

Facebookfig2

Now, just ’cause it worked for these few, doesn’t say to me that it will work for others. Yet it shows that those talking Facebook  on its own terms are most likely to reap the benefits.

Why are news providers on Facebook?

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Bit of a follow up to the piece I wrote last week about news apps on Facebook – I quoted Rob Curley, from Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, quite heavily in the piece.

He has since updated with this post expanding on why Wash Post is developing Facebook apps. One of the main reasons – he claims – is marketing, getting Wash Post name and values out there without necessarily having just to rely on news apps to try and drag some of Facebooks page views back to the Wash Post news site.

But the value of the marketing, it seems, comes down to the usability of the app in question. Wash Post had a good start with Compass, which lingered in the top five apps on Facebook for some time, and plans are afoot to revisit the device with some updates and add-ons.

Appaholic.com or a similar device can then be used to measure use/success of the app: how many are looking at it, what time of day, etc, etc – but what this all means and what good can do the news producer is still seems rather arbitrary.