UK internet measurement agency Hitwise recently announced that Twitter's traffic has increased a staggering 1000% over the past year and now exceeds that to Digg.
The Hitwise report reveals something far more interesting, in my mind at least – the way that twitter is driving traffic to other sites, in particularly those of mainstream media. From the PC Advisor article about the report:
source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it
sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the past 12 months.
Almost 10 percent of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and
Media websites, and BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site
visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6 percent of traffic goes
to entertainment websites, while 14.6 percent goes to social networks, 6.6 percent to blogs and 4.5 percent to online retailers.
"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented 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. Britain's most
popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second
most visited website in the UK after Google UK.
Yeh, you read that right – 10% of twitter's downstream traffic, that is the site that people go to after visiting twitter, is to BBC News. The article, unfortunately, is not clear whether this is a global or UK specific statistic but either way it's interesting because it demonstrates that, far from just chit-chatting the day away, people are discussing news and current affairs on twitter as well.
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Good to know that Twitter is gaining traction and that BBC News is such a big topic of conversation on it. That bodes well for the [BBC commissioned] prototype project we’re going to be launching in a few weeks time…