Over the past year, Twitter.com’s audience grew by 46 million unique visitors across the world, and in October the site drew 104.6 million visitors (an increase of 79.4% from last year). However, only 6 million of these new users were in the U.S.
In Japan, Twitter.com reached 13.2 million visitors (growing at 428%), and easily bested Facebook, which saw 5.3 million visitors (with a growth rate of 78%) according to charts from comScore Data Mine. The U.S. saw a very different story: Twitter.com users were at 24 million in November, down from 25.1 million in October. While this still marks a 24% growth rate from last year, the number of unique visitors has not grown since July, as illustrated by a comScore chart of U.S. visitors to Twitter.com.
However, these numbers reflect only the unique visitors to Twitter.com, not the many users that access Twitter via desktop or mobile clients. Also, while growth in number of U.S. users has stalled, time spent on Twitter.com has increased by an impressive 48.5%, most likely a result of the new design rolled out in October.
While the gap between Facebook and Twitter is growing in the U.S., the SF Chronicle speculates that Twitter’s management changes and promotion of Dick Costolo to CEO may be a response to the stalling numbers, and signal a change in the growth and monetization of Twitter.com.
See articles in TechCrunch, SF Chronicle, and Digital Trends for charts and further comparison of Twitter with other social media sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Huffington Post, etc).
