New data released by Nielsen show Twitter's growth slowing down

Jun 24, 2009 15:35 GMT  ·  By

The micro-blogging platform Twitter has been the fastest growing online brand in May 2009, with an impressive 1,448 percent increase in unique visitors year-over-year, but the rapid growth is beginning to show sings of slowing, confirming earlier reports, with only a seven-percent increase in unique visitors from the previous month. The new data from Nielsen shows Twitter's audience growing from 1.2 million uniques in May 2008 to 18.2 million this year.

The average time spent by an Internet user on Twitter also saw a spectacular rise since last year, growing from six minutes and 19 seconds in May 2008 to 17 minutes and 21 seconds in the same month this year. However, month-over-month users spent less time on Twitter, decreasing one percent since April. Most likely, these numbers don't take into account third-party Twitter clients, which are becoming increasingly popular.

The largest social networking site in the world, Facebook, continued its seven-month rule as the number-one online destination among social networks, with 144.3 million unique visitors. US visitors are also on the rise, growing from 71.287 million in April to 75.444 million in May, with a year-over-year growth of 190 percent from 26 million last year.

MySpace may not be getting a lot of good statistics or news lately, with visitors and user numbers slightly down in the last months and massive layoffs in the US and foreign offices, but there is at least one positive bit of data, as it still is the highest-rated social network when it comes to videos streamed and has, in fact, seen a 22.9-percent rise in unique viewers of its video content from the previous month's 9.9 million to 12.2 million in May.