Micro-messaging service Twitter managed to attract more visitors last week than most of the UK's major newspaper websites.
Data from Experian Hitwise for the week ending March 14 shows Twitter’s homepage received more traffic than the homepages of papers including the Sun, Guardian, Telegraph and the Times.
It also attracted more visitors than news aggregator site Google News. Only the Daily Mail managed to draw more traffic.
Speaking on his blog, Experian Hitwise research director, Robin Goad, explained that while the headline facts are accurate, other factors need to be taken into account.
He said figures for the newspaper sites relate only to the company homepage and do not include traffic to sub-sites such as the Guardian’s technology section, or the Times’ online business pages.
However, the figures for Twitter also relate only to the homepage and do not cover visits through third party applications such as Tweetdeck. It’s widely accepted that including these figures would push Twitter’s visitor numbers up considerably.
Goad said: “Even taking all of these caveats into account, the trend is clear: in the UK, Twitter now receives more internet traffic than most of the main newspaper websites and is growing at a faster rate.”
Twitter recently announced that over 10 billion tweets had now passed through its network.