Twitter Passes NYT, WSJ in Unique Visitors
Where do you get your news from? While there's a lot of reasons to visit Twitter online, it's essentially a place to learn about what's going on in your world. For the first time last month, the site saw more unique visitors than the websites of both the New York Times and the Wall St. Journal.
Tameka Kee noticed the numbers via traffic analysts Compete.com and posted about them briefly on PaidContent today. Traffic numbers are fickle but Compete competitor Quantcast puts Twitter even further in the lead.
Kee attributes the surge to last month's Oprah, Ashton, CNN lovefest for Twitter. We suspect that is just one of a number of factors. Twitter is also really useful, fun and captivating.
Of course Facebook is much, much bigger - but for some reason non-users tend to take Facebook more seriously than Twitter. It's probably the Harvard connection and the similarity with MySpace. Twitter is a different animal. It's more interesting.
And now it's more visited online than the New York Times and Wall St. Journal sites. That's pretty incredible. Of course Twitter doesn't create original content. Does it?
We found the PaidContent post via NY Times designer Jeremy Zilar (on Twitter) who was passing it along from the Twitter account of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. The Lab posted a video tour of the New York Times R&D lab this morning, where the very forward-looking newspaper giant is exploring ways to deliver its content to new devices, to satisfy advertisers in a changed media world, and to aim (presumably) not lose to Twitter as the news outlet of the future.
The Times is watching Twitter closely. The Twitter API (Application Programming Interface) has been key to Twitter's success. The NYT has released a bevy of great APIs of its own. Tomorrow the company will announce a new up-to-the-minute view of all its stories called Timeswire, linked to from the front page of the site. PR for that product said "Think Twitter & Facebook redesign." That product is built on top of the company's newswire API. At a news room strategy meeting yesterday the company said it "believes [it] can create significant revenue streams from APIs." That could well be the future of news.
Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times. We also use Twitter a lot to do our jobs. Twitter-reporter picture by Scott Macdonald, originally for our post How We Use Twitter For Journalism.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Jolie Odell.
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wake me up when Twitter gets more traffic than craigslist =)
We all know for sure that this is reasonable.
Are these stats American visits only?
It just seems unfair to compare these stats when the 2 news content providers are typically for America (I recognise I could visit them but why would I; the UK has similar) versus twitter; a global application.
Kris's comment about the international factor seems crucial.
I'm also inclined to thing that Twitter's cross-device usage confounds these numbers. That is, I'd bet any given Twitter user is a lot more likely to show up as two or more unique visitors because of using the site from phone + web.
Along the same lines, are API numbers included within these stats?
but it is the nytimes, wsj, and the like that are still creating the stories that people twitter about. It is interesting to see this growth in twitter activity. And it is also interesting to think that user generated content does not provide a means by which to rid our news dependency on the big companies. It seems that investigative journalism is the lifeline of newspapers. Sorry twitter.
This is great news. Twitter rules.nytimes, wsj helped it to grow :)
Was checking here for some updates on Twitter:
http://www.techunits.com/content/list_all/87/twitter
I would think unique visitors would be only one aspect of determining a site's popularity. Wouldn't amount of time spent provide a more accurate measurement of online popularity when making the apples to oranges comparison between twitter, NYT, WSJ?
Thats why Tweetvertising is big money
http://twtad.com/index.php?id=9628
Right, Twitter gets bigger and bigger. What's next? Noah Lieske
Is Twitter bleeding money faster than the WSJ or NYT? This reminds me of the old AOL days, "Wow, look at all of their users! Imagine the mountains of cash they can generate when they monetize them!" Uh huh.
Good news all around I guess eh?