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• 2009
• Twitter traffic has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months

HITWISE UK SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATE

Twitter traffic has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months

 

London, 21 January 2009 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service and an Experian company, today reveals that UK Internet traffic to Twitter, the "micro-blogging" service and social network, has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months. For the week ending 17/01/09, www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 for the week ending 19/01/08. UK Internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period.

"Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down," commented Robin Goad, Director of research for Hitwise in the UK. "If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers could be even higher. Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com  has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now."

Celebrity Tweeters help boost profile

Over the last few weeks, a number of famous Twitter fans have helped boost the site's UK profile. Stephen Fry (twitter.com/stephenfry) has over 50,000 followers, John Cleese (twitter.com/JohnCleese) can claim more than 30,000, and 2,000 people are following Andy Murray's progress at the Australian Open (twitter.com/andy_murray). Jonathan Ross (twitter.com/Wossy), 13,000+ followers) has used the service to communicate with fans during his 3 month suspension from the BBC. The comedian has used his show business contacts to validate celebrity Twitter accounts, and is currently operating under the moniker "Number One Twitter Detective". The most followed Twitter user is new American President Barack Obama (twitter.com/BarackObama), who has over 140,000 followers.

Twitter more popular in UK than USA, broadening its user base

Twitter receives the largest amount of its traffic from the USA, but its penetration is greater in the UK market. For the week ending 17/01/09, www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, accounting for 0.024% of all Internet visits; while in the USA it ranked 350th, picking up 0.020% of all Internet visits.

"In Britain Twitter is still most popular with younger users in urban areas, but its appeal is broadening as it grows," commented Goad. "The fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors to www.twitter.com."

Twitter sending traffic to other sites, helping social networking growth

Twitter is becoming an important source of Internet traffic for many sites, and the amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months. Almost 10% of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to News and Media websites, and BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk ) is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com. A further 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6% goes to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers. "As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," commented Goad. "A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."

The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. Britain's most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK (www.google.co.uk). On Christmas Day (25/12/08), Facebook received one in every 22 UK Internet visits, and its growth helped Hitwise's Social Networking and Forums category account for 10.1% of all UK Internet visits during December - the first time that the industry has passed the 10% threshold. Twitter is also included in the category, and currently ranks 23rd.

You can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter at twitter.com/Hitwise_UK  

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behaviour of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up-to-date-analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

+44 20 7378 3619