Following the trend in the US

Dec 23, 2009 09:56 GMT  ·  By

The outlook is looking moderately optimistic for Twitter on the revenue front, but things aren't going so great when it comes to traffic, at least for the main site. While in the US Twitter had flatlined for months now and even saw a dip in October, internationally it was still going strong. This isn't the case anymore, as it seems that growth is slowing down around the world with twitter.com seeing a rise of only 3.5 percent in audience in November, according to comScore numbers.

Twitter.com got 60.3 million visitors in November worldwide compared to 58.3 million in the previous month. A 2 million visitors growth is nothing to sneer at, but compared to the huge bumps it was seeing just six months ago, things aren't looking good. The most worrying issue though isn't the current slowdown, but the overall trend which seems to be following the one in the US. And if things continue like in the US, we may even be seeing a decrease in visitors in the coming months.

That may not happen though as the site has been undergoing a major focus on the international market having released translated versions of the site in the major European languages, FIGS (French, Italian, German and Spanish). Even more volunteer translations are coming, so this may spur further interest in the site, at least for the short term. If this will be enough to turn the tide and get things moving again remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, in the US, things are as gloomy as ever, traffic saw a small uptick of 100,000 visitors, a welcomed change from the 8 percent drop in October, but with the visitors number just below 20 million for a few months now, it's at 19.37 million for November, despite the numerous new features like Lists, the ill-fated retweet and others, Twitter is running out of options.

As always though, traffic numbers for twitter.com come with one major caveat, a lot of people are using the service through mobile or desktop apps, in total perhaps as many as are visiting the site, and those numbers seem to be growing at a steady pace so, on the whole, Twitter may not be doing so bad, but it's still worrying that it's not managing to attract more people to the site.