"The recent explosion of user-generated content has helped create a worldwide marketplace for widgets," said Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore.  "comScore is excited to be providing measurement for this developing content medium."

comScore examined the top ten widgets worldwide and found that photo related widgets were the most popular. In April 2007, Slide was the most popular widget provider with a global reach of over 117 million unique viewers and 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. Other popular photo related widgets included RockYou (82 million viewers), PictureTrail (31 million viewers), and Photobucket (28 million viewers).

"We are excited to see comScore’s report, which validates the enormous reach of the widget economy," said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. "This report will help to demonstrate the importance of widgets to advertisers and publishers."

In April, widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, Western Europe was second with 24.3 percent followed by Latin America with 17.5 percent.