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June 2009 Articles
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Twitter experiences massive rise in traffic - Net.Matters - June 2009
The social networking site, Twitter was widely reported in the online news sites this month as being the fastest growing website in the UK. According to the web analysts, Hitwise, Twitter is now the 38th most visited site in the UK, compared to its position of 969th most visited site last year. Compared to other social networking sites, Twitter was ranked 84th most popular in 2008, whilst this year it has moved up to a 5th place ranking of most popular social networks. Quoted in the Independent, Eden Zoller, an analyst at Ovum accounted for its growth in popularity by saying: "It is successful because it is easy and effective. It has the 'cool' factor being used in political demonstrations in Iran and London, and people who are curious about the celebrities that use it."
The majority of Twitter's growth has come in 2009 - and director of research at Hitwise, Robin Goad suggests it's popularity could be even higher: "If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck were included, the numbers could be even higher."
Generating revenue and creating a business model to build on the huge success of the site has now become the focus of the site's founders - Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. Hitwise reported that during May, Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to UK media and newspaper sites - but traffic is not generating into sales as businesses using Twitter to the same degree that Google or Facebook does - and as Robin Goad is quoted in the Telegraph: "Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect. However, with one or two exceptions, most notably Dell, which claims to have generated $3m in sales via Twitter, very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by those running the company if they are to make the service a financial success."
The majority of Twitter's growth has come in 2009 - and director of research at Hitwise, Robin Goad suggests it's popularity could be even higher: "If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck were included, the numbers could be even higher."
Generating revenue and creating a business model to build on the huge success of the site has now become the focus of the site's founders - Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. Hitwise reported that during May, Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to UK media and newspaper sites - but traffic is not generating into sales as businesses using Twitter to the same degree that Google or Facebook does - and as Robin Goad is quoted in the Telegraph: "Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect. However, with one or two exceptions, most notably Dell, which claims to have generated $3m in sales via Twitter, very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by those running the company if they are to make the service a financial success."
