14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of reports are coming in about the sudden slowing of Twitter's meteoric growth in the last months. But it looks like these shouldn't worry the micro-blogging platform providers too much, as it seems users just need some time to warm up to the service. The numbers from comScore coming in today show 37.6 million unique visitors to the site worldwide for the month of May, a 16-percent rise from the previous month, while the growth in the US is even more worrying, with only 3.5 percent.
The numbers are far lower than the 68-percent growth from March to April. However, Twitter visitor numbers can be misleading, since as much as half of Twitter registered users employ desktop or mobile clients, while comScore and other traffic-analysis companies only measure the traffic on Twitter's web page.
However, the declining growth in the number of Twitter visitors may not tell the whole picture, as TechCrunch points out, since the number of page views Twitter is getting has actually increased by 30 percent in the previous month to 900 million worldwide. This would seem to indicate that, while the service isn't acquiring as many new users and visitors as before, the ones that actually come to the site do so much often than before. This growth in user retention would contradict earlier reports that found that many Twitter users abandoned their accounts after one month, and indicate the fact that the service may take some time warming up to and finding uses for.
The accelerated growth that Twitter has been witnessing this year and the especially huge spike during March and April are too fresh to make any longtime predictions and, while the rate may appear to be slowing in May, recent events like the Iran crisis may have further increased Twitter's reach, so it is difficult to know how it will stand six or 12 months from now.