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Twitter traffic increases 10-fold in a year
Sunday, 21 Jan, 2009
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UK internet traffic to mirco-blogging service and social network Twitter has risen 10-fold over the last 12 months, new figures show.
For the week ending January 17, www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 in the equivalent week last year.
UK internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period, according to online competitive intelligence service Hitwise.
The most followed Twitter user is new US president Barack Obama ( twitter.com/BarackObama), who has over 140,000 followers.
Hitwise UK director of research Robin Goad said: "Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
"If anything, the service is 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 could be even higher.
“Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now."
Twitter receives the largest amount of its traffic from the US, but its penetration is greater in the UK, Hitwise has calculated.
"In Britain Twitter is still most popular with younger users in urban areas, but its appeal is broadening as it grows," said Goad. "The fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors to www.twitter.com."
The amount of traffic Twitter sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months.
Almost 10% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to news and media websites, and BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk) is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com.
A further 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6% goes to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers.
"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," said Goad. "A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."
The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. The UK’s most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.
by Phil Davies
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