Yesterday, Josh Catone of Read/Write Web did a blog post titled "Another Way to Measure Electoral Clout: Watch the Widgets." We had sent him this data after we uncovered it last week.  It is pretty cool! 

Last summer, the Obama Campaign used Widgetbox to publish a number of their widgets, and while they are the only official campaign widgets we’ve received, we have widgets for all the candidates.  It’s been pretty fascinating to watch, and we noticed that when Obama’s campaign started closing in on the Democratic nomination, impressions to his widgets shot up 40% in one week, and subscriptions went up a whopping 62%.  This prompted us to pull the data for the other candidates, and we found that in the same week impressions and hits on Clinton’s widgets went down -17% and -8%, respectively.  McCain didn’t fare much better – his hits were down 11%, and while his subs were up officially 129%, that’s because his widgets went from an average of 3 subscriptions to an average of 4.  Here’s what Josh had to say about it:

Even though last night’s big contests in Kentucky and Oregon ended in a
split decision, with big wins for both Senators Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton, most pundits now agree on who is most likely to be the
Democratic nominee for president when the convention rolls around in
August. Hint: it’s the candidate who has dominated nearly every method
we could think of to measure election momentum on the web. We got some
data last night from widget-provider Widgetbox that shows the same trend for viral widget installs… Obama has dominated the online discussion since
day one. It would appear that when it comes to spreading his campaign
message via widgets, there’s no exception to the rule — Obama widgets
are far and away the most popular. (Though, note that the data on this
graph is based on the candidate’s most popular widget in the Widgetbox
system, and not averaged across multiple widgets — so it’s really only
good for looking at a general trend.)

We think using widgets to assess this data is pretty nifty.  Viral spread has been enormously important in Obama’s campaign, and widgets are a great proxy to that.  As widgets become more and more a part of everyone’s daily online lives, we believe this is only the beginning of ways widget use can measure effectiveness.  Pretty exciting stuff!

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