• Business Week, Tuesday, January 8, 2008 11 AM

Social networking sites like MySpace could reach $1 billion in ad sales by the end of the year, but widget makers won't be seeing much of that revenue. For all their traffic, social networks still aren't properly monetized. Part of the problem for widget makers, which aim to make money by developing software for social networks, is a lack of reliable data about how many people use their products.

ComScore, sensing a big opportunity for advertisers, wants to fill that void. According to the Web measurement firm, nearly 586 million Internet users viewed embedded software in November 2007, a massive figure when you consider that the population of the United States is 300 million. Meanwhile, ad spending on widgets was a mere $20 million in 2007.

Why the big jump? comScore's previous method only tracked Adobe's Flash software, which is used to create most of the widgets on the Web today. The biggest omission was Facebook, included now that comScore's covers software built using JavaScript, another Web programming language. Now that more widgets are being counted, comScore hopes the ad dollars will start to flow for widget makers like Rock You and Slide.

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