Did Twitter Just Pass Digg in Traffic? One Reliable Source Says It Did
Widely respected web traffic analyst firm Hitwise has just issued a report that we find, frankly, impossible to believe. Hitwise says that last week Twitter saw more web traffic than Digg for the first time.
We've posted the numbers and charts below, along with some thoughts on how this may or may not be possible. You be the judge.
Hitwise says that last week Twitter was the 84th most visited site in its Computers and Internet category of websites and Digg was the 85th. Digg gets its traffic from Google, Hitwise says, and Twitter mostly from "social networks."
The needle moving event? According to Hitwise the much publicized Twitter coverage of the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last Thursday drove a whole lot of traffic. That can't explain it all though.
There's a bunch of caveats we have to mention here. Specifically, Hitwise notes that much of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile devices that aren't counted. We'd add that much of Digg's traffic probably comes from paranoid and tech-savvy users who evade traffic monitoring software, though much of Hitwise's data comes directly from ISPs and is harder to evade than other monitoring methods might be.
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