Mar 15 2007

Twitter – The funny thing about Stats…

Published by at 8:24 pm under twitter

I’m still not sure I’m sold on the whole Twitter thing, but I’m continually hearing all the “cool kids” raving on about it, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise Intelligence (US) wrote today “Twitter Stats – Growing but Still Niche” which indicated a slowing in traffic to the site. Heather writes

I am not yet ready to say that Twitter has tipped. Perhaps it has among technophile bloggers. Whislt (sic) the site shows promise it has a way to go before it reaches a mass audience.

Her graphs showing both UK and US traffic respectively are below.

Twitter UK Traffic

Twitter US Traffic

Compare this to the latest Alexa figures:

Twitter Alexa Traffic Reach

Funny how stats can be so different.

Given that the traffic rankings for the US is 667, and UK 969 (450 in Spain and 950 in Australia), it doesn’t really seem to follow that the traffic is dropping in these two countries.

Perhaps Twitter is more popular with the “Alexa Toolbar Type” i.e. that the “technophile bloggers” are adopting it?

8 responses so far

8 Responses to “Twitter – The funny thing about Stats…”

  1. Beckyon 16 Mar 2007 at 11:40 am

    To me it seems kinda silly, but I was intrigued enough to sign up and put the Twitter widget on my blog.

    Tweet:)

    ~Becky

  2. Elaine Vigneaulton 16 Mar 2007 at 11:45 am

    Tag, you’re it. 2k bloggers might be a book cover and we’re all going around telling our neighbors about it. If you want to opt out leave a comment here
    http://www.jaffejuice.com/2007/03/the_winning_des.html Details are also at that address.
    Take care :)

  3. Megon 16 Mar 2007 at 12:16 pm

    Hi Becky

    I’ll see you there :)

  4. Megon 16 Mar 2007 at 12:16 pm

    Hi Elaine

    I’ve sent a message to Sam – thanks for letting me know.

  5. Craigon 17 Mar 2007 at 1:25 am

    They have been having problems serving traffic lately. That might account for the hitwise dip.
    I also wonder how much an impact purely SMS users of the service might be having on the stats. How many people sign up, add their friends and don’t return that often to the site? Twitterific the Mac app a lot of users appear to be using may exacerbate the effect. Unfortunately I can’t try it not having a Mac like the cool kids but from what I’ve seen you can perform most of your actions within it without having to leave the comfort of your desktop. A better metric may be the frequency of the public timeline.

  6. Craigon 17 Mar 2007 at 6:04 am

    twitteraffic

  7. Megon 17 Mar 2007 at 11:10 am

    Hi Craig

    How uncool am I? I’ve never even TOUCHED a Mac! So I can’t comment there 😉

    Thanks for that link – it’s interesting.

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