CLIP Twitter enters top 100 sites; UK traffic has trebled already in 2009

Last week (w/e 07/02/09) Twitter became one of the 100 most visited websites in the UK for the first time. It ranked 91st within All Categories, placing above online heavyweights such as Expedia UK (96), Gumtree (100), easyJet (101), Digital Spy (103) and Money Supermarket (105). As the chart below illustrates, Twitter now ranks as 7th within our Social Networking and Forums category, up from 23rd just 3 weeks ago.

Twitter traffic has already more than trebled this year, and much of that growth has come since we last wrote about the site in January. As the chart below illustrates, there was a noticeable increase in visits following the media attention generated by the likes of Stephen Fry (owner of the world’s second favourite Twitter feed after Barack Obama) and Jonathon Ross.

Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27 fold. However, the service is likely even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

One of the reasons for Twitter’s success is the ‘eco-system’ of sites and applications that it has created via its open API. One of the most notable is Twitpic, which essentially allows users to upload pictures to their Twitter profiles. Last the site ranked 7th in our Entertainment – Photography category last week, up from 26th a month ago. Twitpic is still small in comparison to Flickr and Photobucket, but is growing rapidly. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet traffic to the site has increased more than 5 fold already this year.

You Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter here. It’s also interesting to note that Twitter hasn’t quite achieved world domination yet. While it’s winning in the US and Australia, in Singapore Twitter currently trails Plurk.