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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Twitter - Google Marriage - what would it mean?

April 08, 2009

To piggy back on a post my colleague across the pond, Robin Goad, did yesterday, we thought we'd revisit some of the stats to better understand how things would look if Google were to acquire Twitter.

As the chart below illustrates, US Internet visits to Twitter have increased 194% since the start of the year and nearly 7000 times in the last 12 months (March 08-09). Last week (w/e 04/04/09), Twitter was the 69th most visited website in the US, up from 74 the week before, 86 two weeks ago and 105 three weeks ago. It was the 8th most popular social networking site. The website has enjoyed steady and constant growth. Share of US Internet visits to Twitter have increased every week since mid-November 2008.

I should also add the usual caveat: the service is probably even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

But where does Twitter send its traffic to? It may be the 69th most visited website in the US, but Twitter was also the 66th biggest source of traffic to other websites in the US during March. A few weeks ago we posted data showing where US consumers go after visiting Twitter.

Here is an updated version of the chart from my last post. This time I am using March data and I changed the chart type to ease comparison.
Downstream from Twitter.png

As I mentioned in my last post, "it appears that Twitter is being used as a social network and means of distributing content. This is by no means the only way it is being used - just one standout trend. Twitter.com's clickstream profile is much closer to a social network than to Search Engines or Email Services. Twitter's clickstream differs markedly from search engines in that relatively little traffic goes to retail websites and Education (i.e. Wikipedia). It is also different from Email in that less traffic goes to Dating websites and again, to retail and Business and Finance websites."

In other words, Twitter sends far less traffic to industries that are the big spenders on search engine marketing than does Google.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:31 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Search