We consider products of an independent and identically distributed sequence in a set $\{f_1,\ldots ,f_m\}$ of orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms of the circle. We can naturally associate a Lyapunov exponent $\lambda $ . Under few assumptions, it is known that $\lambda \leq 0$ and that the equality holds if and only if $f_1,\ldots ,f_m$ are simultaneously conjugated to rotations. In this paper, we state a quantitative version of this fact in the case where $f_1,\ldots ,f_m$ are $C^k$ perturbations of rotations with rotation numbers $\rho (f_1),\ldots ,\rho (f_m)$ satisfying a simultaneous diophantine condition in the sense of Moser [On commuting circle mappings and simultaneous diophantine approximations. Math. Z.205(1) (1990), 105–121]: we give a precise estimate of $\lambda $ (Taylor expansion) and we prove that there exist a diffeomorphism g and rotations $r_i$ such that $\mbox {dist}(gf_ig^{-1},r_i)\ll |\lambda |^{{1}/{2}}$ for $i=1,\ldots , m$ . We also state analogous results for random products of $2\times 2$ matrices, without any diophantine condition.