Twitter not a big source of news and media traffic

Wed Mar 17 2010, 09:05 AM

Just 0.14% of upstream traffic to news and media websites comes from Twitter.com, ranking the microblogging platform in a lowly 39th position on Hitwise’s list of news sources. In contrast, Facebook accounted for 3.64% of visits in the week ending March 14, making it the third-biggest source of upstream traffic. Google News ranked eleventh, accounting for 1.27% of traffic. However, what the data fails to illustrate is the growing trend for people to receive their news from Twitter in a series of short-form updates, while ignoring the links to the actual news stories. It's almost equivalent to be people headlines in traditional publications.

The Hitwise research found that less than 5% of downstream visits made by Twitter.com users were to news and media sites. The majority of traffic goes to entertainment and social networking sites – each accounting for 30% of visits – followed by search engines, which comprise 12%. Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins notes that while upstream visits to news and media sites referred by Twitter have increased by 54% year-on-year, that figure is much lower than the 138% growth seen for traffic to all categories.

"Twitter has enjoyed explosive growth, nearly tripling its share of US internet visits year-on-year last week," says Hopkins. "However, news and media companies have not seen similar growth rates in upstream traffic from the site."

However, there is a serious weakness in Hitwise’s study which is that it does not count the number of people accessing Twitter with third-party clients such as TweetDeck or UberBerry. This could skew the data by a large margin. Estimates for how many people are using third-party clients instead of visiting the Twitter.com site range from about 50% to as much as 80%. Hitwise cannot say how many of these Twitter users are clicking through to news sites.

Despite the limits of Hitwise’s study, the figures hint that traditional news companies aren't harnessing the power of sites such as Twitter. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Centre more than half of those who read news online and use social networks prefer to have content recommended to them by people they follow. Twitter should therefore by a key driver for this type of traffic.