Slide pounds chest: Widget used by 14 percent of internet population

Internet traffic measurement company ComScore will release data showing that slideshow company Slide is the world’s top widget provider.

We don’t want to fall into the habit of issuing these numbers constantly, but the sheer size of Slide’s usage, if true, is mind-boggling — especially given that San Francisco’s Slide is hardly two years old.

It has a reach of 117 million unique viewers, around 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. By contrast, competitor RockYou has around 82 million viewers and photo company Photobucket has 28 million viewers, Slide said in a statement, ahead of Comscore’s data. If Photobucket was bought for hundreds of millions, Slide may also command a nice sum. The question is still, how do you monetize slideshows?

Slide is led by workaholic Max Levchin (pictured above), formerly co-founder of PayPal. Levchin has said Slide will collect substantial data about users, which potentially could be useful for advertisers.

The numbers are impressive, any way you look at them. Slide is getting more than 200,000 new slideshows added each day.