Markets

Twitter Traffic Is Back! (Although It Never Really Went Away.)

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: February 17, 2010 / 3:41 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Here's a fact from comScore which sticks a stake straight into the heart of Twitter skeptics: worldwide traffic to Twitter.com rose eight percent between December and January to 73.5 million visitors.

Maybe that doesn't surprise, you -- Twitter is supposed to be the hot platform, isn't it? -- but this is more important than it looks for two reasons:

It alters a trend that had taken hold late last year in which Twitter.com traffic was flattening out.
It also, in all likelihood, bodes well for the Twitter traffic most of us don't see. That's the traffic that comes from the ever-growing list of Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, that carry most of Twitter's traffic.

Twitter.com, which is what the comScore stats measure, is increasingly a service for Twitter newbies, the people who are least likely to be heavy users of the service because they haven't built up a robust list of followers (and followees). In the larger world of Twitter apps, including ones that move over mobile devices and other non Web-based platforms, Twitter.com represents far less than half of all Twitter activity. Though stats about how actual Twitter usage breaks out vary, Twitter traffic outside of its Web site could run as high as 80 percent of the total.

If past is prologue, many of these newer Twitter users will eventually find Twitter.com doesn't offer as many features as they would like; they will move to other Twitter clients where much of the action takes place. Although Twitter growth will slow down at some point, this pattern should hold for some time -- in the past year, also per comScore, it has posted a growth rate of 1,105 percent.

You'll note I cited two reasons above why the increase to traffic at Twitter.com is more important than it looks. But there is a third reason, which has nothing to do with platforms, and everything to do with perception. Over the last six months, the service has been dogged by negative stats that gave the perception that Twitter had peaked -- in almost every case, that's because the data was only about Twitter.com without pointing out how limited that data is in portraying true Twitter activity. The truth is that Twitter never really was in danger of losing its mojo, but increased traffic to Twitter.com should blunt the perception that it had giving people a more accurate view of its huge influence in digital media.