14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has seen some spectacular growth earlier this year and, thanks to the number of celebrities that started using it, a lot of attention from the mainstream audience. But, while the users skyrocketed, there was an increasing number of nay-sayers doubting that the microblogging service could sustain the growth or even maintain it. Now, despite closing a huge funding round, new numbers from Hitwise show that the detractors may have been right and Twitter has not only stopped growing but actually dipped in visits and interest over the summer.
Spurred by Twitter's new $1 billion valuation, Hitwise general manager for global research, Bill Tancer, decided to share some traffic numbers to put the new funding in perspective. In his report he found that Twitter's share of the overall Internet traffic has been dropping lately. Having reached a peak of 0.20 percent of the traffic in June 2009 it has since dropped to 0.17 percent. Still, just one year ago it was at 0.01 percent so the site has definitely grown tremendously in the past year.
A part of the decline can be explained by users moving to desktop or mobile clients and dropping the site but not leaving the service altogether. This is most definitely true as third-party clients account for a significant part of Twitter's traffic, as much as 50 percent, and are not taken into consideration by these reports but even so, while Twitter may not be actually losing any users, it may not be gaining any new ones either as these would most likely start with the website and then maybe move to other apps.
But if the first graph can be argued against, the second one is more telling as it shows the number of searches Internet users made for Twitter. There was a huge uptake in spring but the traffic then started leveling off in April and hasn't grown since reaching 0.53 percent in September. While the data doesn't always show the whole picture is does reveal a worrying trend, one that Twitter will have to turn around, maybe by using some of the money it just got.
