Twitter more of a siren in March, says comScore
It has been experiencing double-digit growth for months now, but in March Twitter Web traffic went boom in a big way, jumping 131% to 9.3 million unique visitors. It was the fastest growing Web property last month according to comScore, which released its March numbers this week.
(Remember this as we wait for next month's comScore numbers. Those will reflect April's strange celebrity infatuation with the service -- Ashton Kutcher's competition with CNN to garner a million followers, not to mention Oprah's imprimatur -- yes, other people care about Oprah even if you don't.)
But that's April's news; what happened in March? ComScore analyst Andrew Lipsman, writing on the company's blog, hypothesizes that it's ascribable to some combination of Twitter's presence in the news and news junkies' presence on Twitter. He points to substantial overlap between Twitter visitors and those visiting major news sites such as CNN.com, and says that Twitter's older demographics were a clue that such might be the case.
Still, all this activity still makes Twitter only the 114th most popular site in comScore's survey. The top five remain Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Fox Interactive; in the ton ten, Facebook moved up one spot to #9.
Of more interest are the seasonal upstarts. As you might expect during tax season, visitors have their mind on their money, and FreeCreditReport.com and Bankrate.com showed growth of 6% and 12% respectively. Concerns over the highly publicized Conficker worm gave AVG's grisoft.com site an 82% jump.
More cheerfully, travel sites are beginning to show seasonal upticks; as a category, travel-site traffic grew 18%, with car-rental and airline sites both up 11%. Baseball's back too, with MLB.com expecting a 35% upswing.