Comscore says that in April 2007 there were 177,000,000 unique viewers for widgets - which by their definition are "data files that can be embedded into a site’s HTML code and are typically displayed in a small viewing pane on the site." And they seem to have skipped YouTube, so that would have probably increased the number by at least a couple...

Most widgets have controls or interactivity options for users, so who knows how many clicks took place inside these widgets? Nobody. And that's a problem.

Widgets currently exist outside the purview of web analytics - you can't track the clicks inside widgets on your site, and if you distribute your own content in widgets you can't incorporate those 'remote' views or interactions either.

So web analytics are ignoring the Widget Economy. As the numbers above show, this is a material oversight. Analytics vendors need to get themselves together and create a standard widget reporting mechanism, and present it to the widget developers of the world, pronto. Widget consumers (bloggers in large part, but other sites too) then need to demand that the widgets they support embrace this standard, enabling them to track the clicks that take place within these wonderful little windows.

By any expectation we're at the very start of Widget World. Time for the analytics folks to join the party.