April showers bring May comScore numbers

Here's food for thought: Twitter isn't just more popular than professional wrestling, though that's something of a shock. It's more popular than baseball. Seems un-American, doesn't it.

It's more popular than MLB.com, anyway; the April comScore numbers are out, and the microblogging service is the 56th most popular site around (as far as unique visitors go), compared to MLB.com's 87th-place ranking. But all three sites are, along with the 236th-ranked stompin' matches World Wrestling Entertainment site, among the top-gaining properties as measured by the Reston, Va.-based ratings service.

Twitter rose 83%, buoyed by flattering attention from Oprah and a "contest" between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to amass a million subscribers. Putting the numbers another way, as comScore Andrew Lipsman did in a blog entry today, the service has quadrupled its audience in two months. It's the third-largest social network now, behind MySpace and Facebook, the latter of which also experienced 10% growth since March. The category as a whole is up 12%, with nearly three-quarters of all Americans checking in at least once during the month.

But the rising star of April wasn't social networking. Instead, the distinctly antisocial H1N1 (swine) flu made CDC.gov April's biggest gainer, shooting up 142% with 5.7 million unique visitors. ComScore had earlier revealed that over 500,000 Americans sought swine-flu information online during the final week of April. Rounding out the top ten list of gaining properties were ChinaOnTV.com, Move Network, Betawave Partners (a partial list), hollywood,net, teen.com, and the family of Wikia sites. Tax-prep sites fell off the list, as one would expect by month's end, as did travel.

On the big chart -- the Top 50 Properties list -- the only movement in the top 10 was a spot switch between the #8 Wikimedia Foundation site family and #9 Facebook, though #7 eBay made progress on closing the gap between itself and the #6 Ask Network, with not much more than half a million's difference between the two now. (Recapping the top 5: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Fox. Feel free to memorize for future reference.) Wells Fargo and whitepages.com slipped off the Top 50 for the month, replaced by NetShelter Technology Media and NBC Universal.