Traffic to Twitter is declining, Hitwise General Manager of Global Research Bill Tancer writes, while Facebook's growth continues to go through the roof. Facebook is approaching ubiquity, while Twitter's appeal is narrow and its average registered user is totally unengaged. "That being said," Tancer writes, "I still plan to tweet this entry."

Facebook feels more secure though, it's got clearer social hooks and it's easier to start using. As a result, Facebook is probably ten or more times the size of Twitter. As Twitter user Justin Houk put it today, "Twitter is a cult classic in the making - not a blockbuster."

The Hitwise data doesn't take into account the use of 3rd party Twitter clients, but the Twitter website is a more common way to interact with the service and its traffic is a good proxy for overall Twitter use.

What are the relative business prospects for both, long term? It's hard to say, but charts like these from Hitwise have got to make Twitter HQ feel uneasy.

See also: Facebook Has Twitter Envy - But Why? and Twitter and Facebook Investment Terms and Game Plans

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

In the long run, these numbers could obviously turn out to be nothing more than a blip on the radar for Bing. After all, even the numbers for Google fluctuate every month. We also haven't seen numbers for September from other analytics firms like Hitwise or Compete yet, though while they often differ, they usually agree with StatCounter when it comes to general trends.

The question, of course, is why Bing stopped growing last month. Did Microsoft scale back its marketing campaign? Or did users, after the novelty wore off, simply go back to Google?

It Works, But The Competition is Better

When you are looking for a house, location is a key factor, and just like Zillow, Google Maps puts a house's location at the front and center of its presentation. Looking at houses on Google Maps, however, also quickly makes it clear that Google is only aggregating data from listing web sites and getting its data from brokers who update their listing on Google Base. This means that listings on Google Maps are not necessarily as up to date or as comprehensive as those you could find on similar services.

It is also quite obvious that real estate listings aren't the focus of Google Maps. Google's competition generally offers far more options when searching for a house (type of house, lot size, year built, etc.), and does a better job at displaying other important information about a house and the neighborhood (quality of local schools, for example).

While it is good to see that Google is re-dedicating itself to the real estate market, this is hopefully only the beginning of the company's efforts, because in its current state, these listings on Google Maps are a nice addition to a great product, but don't hold up as a real estate offering in its own right.

Searches for "home depot" registered one of the most stunning declines in paid clicks, as only 0.83% of searches went to a paid listing in the last four weeks, compared to just over 39% a year ago.

Recession? Or are Companies Getting Smarter About Search?

In part, this decline can be explained by the current economic climate, which has led many companies to reduce their search marketing spend. In its latest quarterly earnings report, Google noted that paid clicks across all of its AdSense partners only increased by 3% in the last quarter of 2008, though the search giant didn't release any detailed statistics about paid search traffic.

However, as Andy Beal points out, this reduction in spending on search could also mean that some of the large brands like Orbitz or Home Depot have simply figured out that, given that they are already the #1 search term for their respective brands, there is really no need to spend a lot on paid advertising.

As we reported earlier this month, some retailers have been shifting their budgets away from search-engine marketing and towards email and social marketing. At the same time, though, small number of companies are also looking at the current downturn as a chance to break into new markets, by expanding their spend on search marketing while their competitors are cutting back their spend in these areas.

Oprah's Midas Touch

Now that Twitter has received Oprah's Midas touch, the real question will be to see how many of these new users will stick around. While Oprah devoted a large segment of her show on Friday to Twitter, she did not really explain the service in any great detail.

We will have to see if the majority of new users will actually use the service as intended, or if they will just stick to following celebrities like Oprah, Britney Spears (who also now has more than 1 million followers), or Aston Kutcher, whose race with CNN for reaching more than 1 million followers surely also helped to spark the sudden rush of new Twitter users (and we can't help but wonder whether the effort of a certain group of users to push a fake user account past Kutcher and CNN by creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts isn't also reflected in these stats).

Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.

There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).

According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.

The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow

Another interesting fact about the downstream clicks from Twitter is that very few users go from Twitter.com to retail, business, or finance sites.

Here are a few other interesting findings:

• after visiting Twitter.com, more users visit Etsy.com, the marketplace for buying all things handmade, than Amazon
• in terms of downstream clicks, CNN.com is the most popular news service on Twitter
• Yahoo Mail gets more downstream clicks than Gmail or Windows Live Mail

One caveat about this data that Hitwise does not mention, however, is that a large number of Twitter users never even visit Twitter.com because they use more fully-featured desktop or mobile clients like Twhirl, TweetDeck, or Tweetie. Hitwise obviously doesn't have access to this data, but it would be interesting to see if those Twitter users who use a Twitter client exhibit a different behavior compared to those who use the web site.

Across the top Google properties, Gmail is now #2, trailing only Google search. However, even with the second position, Gmail is still under 10% of all visits. This is still up 70% from the same week last year, beating YouTube's overall growth of 16% in the same time frame.

Looking at the growth trend between YouTube and Gmail shows how dramatically Gmail has grown over the past year. Gmail has been on a steep, steady growth line while YouTube's fortunes have reversed a number of times. When comparing Gmail to other popular webmail clients Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail, it has a ways to go to get close to capturing the market share of those other products.

Finally, Hitwise reported on the top three sources of traffic to Gmail year-over-year, and the majority of referrals, as could be guessed, is Google itself with 48.83%, up 10% since last year. The runners up are Facebook with 4.37% and Yahoo! Mail with 4.29%. Yahoo! Mail referrals dropped 18% from last year. To us this appears that while adoption of Gmail is growing, it may be as a result of people choosing one web mail provider over another.

Hitwise's latest data also confirms that Google's market share in the search business is continuing to grow at a steady clip (9% year-over-year). Year-over-year, all of Google's larger competitors lost ground, though at least between December and January, both Yahoo and Ask.com saw a very minor increase in their market share.

Longer Search Queries

Year-over-year, using one and two-word search engine queries became slightly less popular, while the number of three-word queries remained flat. Instead, a growing number of users are now opting to use longer queries. Overall, longer search queries have increased ten percent over the last year.

This is an interesting trend, and it could be interpreted in a variety of way. This could mean that a growing number of users is finding less value in the search results they get from relatively unspecific, short queries. It could also indicate that users are becoming more sophisticated in how they structure their queries when they are looking for very specific answers.

Do you have a theory why more users are turning to longer search queries? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkings, Google came very close to catching up with MapQuest in December, but somehow, MapQuest managed to gain some ground again in January. Currently, MapQuest holds 39.49% of the market share in the US and Google Maps is at 35.67%.

Update: Hitwise just supplied us with a new graph that includes data for Live Maps and Yahoo Maps.

What is even more interesting, though, is that most of MapQuest's traffic comes from 'brand searches' - that is users who specifically search for 'mapquest.' Eight out of the top ten search terms leading to MapQuest were variations of its brand name and they accounted for 62% of MapQuests' visitors. For Google Maps, only two out of the top ten search terms were branded and they only accounted for 4.2% of Google Maps' traffic.

Old Habits

It is quite amazing how MapQuest manages to hang on to its top position. Google Maps gets over 60% of its traffic from Google itself, yet it seems that using MapQuest, even though it is barely keeping up with the latest technological advancements on the Internet, is still synonymous with online mapping for a majority of Internet users.

In many ways, this means that a service like Microsoft's Live Maps, which is holding on to a very distant third fourth place, is fighting an uphill battle, even though it provides a number of features like its Birds Eye View that even Google Maps doesn't have. For a lot of mainstream users, however, having access to the latest features doesn't necessarily translate into a reason to switch away from an established service.

We've posted the numbers and charts below, along with some thoughts on how this may or may not be possible. You be the judge. We don't believe it though. Why is this important? Because if the leading microblogging service really topped the leading user-voted news site for eyeballs, that would say a lot about emerging new media paradigms.

The needle moving event? According to Hitwise the much publicized Twitter coverage of the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last Thursday drove a whole lot of traffic. That can't explain it all though.

There's a bunch of caveats we have to mention here. Specifically, Hitwise notes that much of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile devices that aren't counted. We'd add that much of Digg's traffic probably comes from paranoid and tech-savvy users who evade traffic monitoring software, though much of Hitwise's data comes directly from ISPs and is harder to evade than other monitoring methods might be.

Compete.com puts Digg still far, far ahead of Twitter.

Other reports put Twitter's registered users around 5 million. Digg sees monthly unique visitors probably 5 or 6 times that number, at least. Are a whole lot of people visiting Twitter but not registering for accounts? Given all the mainstream media attention Twitter has been getting this year - maybe it is possible. For what it's worth, here at ReadWriteWeb we get a lot of love on Twitter but see far more traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networks.

Twitter couldn't see more traffic than Digg already, could it? This looks more like a Hitwise problem than a changing of the online landscape. If Twitter did pass Digg that would be a big deal - but we don't see that happening any time soon. Sorry Hitwise.

Twitter may be tiny but we love it any way. Come join the RWW crew there via this slideshow of our accounts.

Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?

• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.


• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).


• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).


• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

How good are these numbers from Comscore? It's hard to know. The company is widely respected, but so is Hitwise, another traffic analyst firm that comes up with very different numbers. See our write up in June of a Hitwise report that argued that the video market in general was declining but that YouTube had a 75% marketshare in May. Comscore reports that YouTube has a 44% marketshare. Both companies agree on who the leaders are, perhaps Comscore is just looking further out the long tail in who it includes in the category.

All of these numbers are subject to interpretation and no one's data collection method is anywhere near perfect. Do you believe the assertion that 75% of the US market online watched online video in July? We regularly talk to people who don't know the first thing about anything regarding the internet, but perhaps even they spend time on YouTube or use Windows Media Player to watch news video on the big news portals.

Let us know your take on the believability of these numbers in the poll above. For more details, see Comscore's full report.

Even though Facebook is slowly catching up to MySpace, the gap between the two is still large, with Facebook having a 17% market share and MySpace 72%.

MyYearbook

MyYearbook, interestingly, saw the largest gain of all social networks, a trend we have observed for quite a while now. It grew by almost 320%, though it only has a market share of 1.5%. Its users are also among the most loyal and spend about 30 minutes on the site. MyYearbook, as the name implies, mainly targets the high school market.

England

The data for the UK social networking market is quite different. There, Facebook already has a 45% market share, up an astonishing 172%, while every other major social network there lost between 20% (Bebo) and close to 50% (Friends Reunited and Myspace).

Facebook Still Trying to Catch Up

While Facebook is the fastest growing network and MySpace is bleeding users at a slow by steady clip, Facebook still has a long way to go before it will catch up to MySpace. Even though MySpace has a bad reputation in the blogosphere (though, thanks to some recent initiatives like Data Availability and OpenID integration, this tide might be slowly turning) and Facebook gets a lot of the hype, if advertisers and developers want to reach the largest number of potential users, MySpace is still the place to go for the foreseeable future.

Update: The original graph displayed information from May 2007 instead of June 2007. We have replaced it with the updated version below.

Besides Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask, Hitwise also looked at 42 smaller search engines. Overall, they accounted for only 1.70% of the U.S. market - a number that demonstrates the staggering uphill battle new entrants in the search business have to face.

These latest numbers also once again stress that, at least in the U.S., a combination of Microsoft's and Yahoo's search would create a relatively large competitor to Google. However, looking at the current trends - there is also a good chance that Google would just continue to grow while taking away market share from a combined Microhoo search engine.

Looking at the latest data, Hitwise predicts that Google would either enter the automotive or music market next. Both of these are very broad categories with a large range of competitors already operating in them, but then, that has never stopped Google from entering a new market.

Google Autos

Google could easily build a competitor to cars.com, Vehix, or Autotrader by tying together data from its Google Base product (which already has a 'Vehicles' category) and mashing it up into a more comprehensive used car market by also allowing users (or dealers) to easily put up their own cars for sale. As of now, Google is only aggregating data from all the major online car buying sites.

Google Music

Rumors about Google Music have flared up regularly over the last few years, but so far, no actual product has materialized. Entering the music business is obviously fraught with problems for any new player. Given the issues around licensing music, as well as its failure in selling videos on Google Videos, Google might not want to develop a mainstream music platform.

What Google could do, though, would be to offer a platform for independent musicians, somewhat akin to what MySpace was in its early days or what AmieStreet does today.

Google Travel

Given Google's background in search, we think Google might also be likely to develop a competitor to the large travel aggregator sites like Kayak or FareCompare. Not only is this a market where Google could develop a decent revenue stream outside of its core advertising market, but it would fit in right with Google's core expertise. As of now, Google only links to Kayak, Expedia, Hotwire and others when you enter the right query into its search engine, but it doesn't display any actual results itself yet.

Our Prediction: Travel is Next

If Google is indeed trying to fill out all of these major niches with a product of its own, we think a travel product is still Google's most likely next move. It is not only the closest to Google's core competency of search, but Google could also easily put ads on there as well.