The 10 Sites Benefiting The Most From Twitter's Traffic Explosion
US unique visitors to Twitter grew 83% between March and April, according to ComScore. Since one of the main uses of Twitter is sharing links, we wondered: Who is feeling the Twitter love? We asked Hitwise.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's growth curve has been the story all spring: Nielsen clocked the service's steepest-ever monthly expansion back in March, and Twitter itself used a February blog post to argue that scale had finally made it an "opportunity" rather than an experiment. ComScore's latest numbers extend that arc — US unique visitors up 83% between March and April alone.
What Silicon Alley Insider adds is the demand side of that explosion: since link-sharing is one of Twitter's core uses, it asked Hitwise to rank which ten sites are actually capturing that referral traffic. The piece lands amid a stretch of turbulence for the company — user backlash over a removed feature and press criticism within a turbulent 24 hours — and just days after a report floated, then argued against, rumors that Twitter might index the content of links shared on the service.
First-order effects
- The ten sites Hitwise names get a measurable, ComScore-corroborated windfall of referral visitors they did not have to buy — Twitter has quietly become a free acquisition channel whose beneficiaries can now be ranked.
Second-order effects
- Measurement firms are forced to compete over who quantifies the channel: with ComScore counting audience growth and Hitwise ranking outbound referral benefit, publishers now have two independent vendors validating social traffic as a category worth budgeting against.
Third-order effects
- If link-driven referral keeps scaling at this rate, traffic attribution starts shifting from a search-dominated model toward social distribution — pushing publishers to optimize for shareable headlines rather than keywords, and giving whoever routes the links (currently Twitter) outsized leverage over news-site economics.
The trend: Web traffic is beginning its shift from search-engine referrals to social sharing as a measurable acquisition channel, with analytics firms racing to quantify it through 2009.