After showing hockey-stick growth leading up to the U.S. Presidential Elections, Twitter took a breather in November. According to comScore, unique U.S. visitors to Twitter.com grew less than one percent sequentially from October to 1.466 million. U.S. pageviews declined more precipitously to 19.7 million, from 37.2 million in October (a 47 percent decline).
These numbers suggest that about the same number of people are still visiting Twitter, but without all the election Tweets, they are only finding half as much to keep them interested. Remember, this is just a proxy for Twitter activity, as it only estimates visits to the site, and does not take into account all of the other clients and sites where people consume their Twitter feeds.
If Twitter is taking a breather, the HuffingtonPost is winded. The political uber-blog saw a 20 percent decline in unique U.S. visitors from October to November. U.S unique visitors went from 5 million to 4 million, according to comScore. And U.S. pageviews are down 33 percent to 43 million. (Yeah, we saw this coming). Meanwhile, CNN.com was able to build on its election momentum and broader news coverage to grow its U.S. audience 11.4 percent month-over-month to 27.4 million (although pageviews are down 14 percent).
Good thing HuffingtonPost raised $25 million before the numbers turned south. Now it has to readjust to the post-election environment and broaden its coverage as well.
Plus the general web population still doesn’t care much for Twitter: http://pickfu.com/W78U9E
Agreed, many non-Tech people don’t even know what is Twitter
i suspect that Twitter will spike again during the inaugration, especially since the major wireless carriers around the dc metro area are planning to setup additional towers in anticipation of the 4+ million people
“i suspect that Twitter will spike again during the inaugration”
I doubt we’ll see anything in even remotely the same ballpark as the two months prior to the election. There’s nothing unpredictable about the inauguration, thus there’s not going to be much shuffling from the news junkies on Twitter.
Interesting – guess that’s a logical conclusion based on HuffPo’s focus on the elections. More surprised about Twitter thought.
We’ve seen our (NewsCred) uniques and pageviews increase in November. Probably because of our international focus, and I think HuffPo should probably broaden their international coverage as well. Will serve them well in the long run.
Huff Po will pick up again once inauguration gets rolling.
the dip in traffic was bound to happen, but they both significantly increased the overall size of their userbase and now have the opportunity to add more/new value and keep growing
what’s more interesting is the dip that Hulu took in November. They heavily promoted SNL clips that were extremely popular, and the debates. Comscore has them way down.
Yes but it’s reasonable to think (a few isolated instances aside) people spent time watching news coverage or reading political blogs that they ordinarily spend watching shows on Hulu.
Imagine the amount of money their spike cost employers.
Maybe everyone had to get back to work?
To be expected.
… in related news water is still wet.
No surprise there. Sports properties peak during championships and a presidential election is the analogue for news media.
actually, I think this is a sign of success and future promise for Twitter “groups” or topic-based-aggregators as the Twitter election page was the only page that I ever visit on Twitter.com. I suspect it is similar for many. If there was an NBA page and a Thanksgiving-recepies page, etc then maybe people would still be coming I the site!
I am glad to see that you mentioned that Huff needs to expand their coverage. If they have any smart people behind the scenes, they knew this was coming and are not hit by a surprise.
I am also glad that it was mentioned that some of the Twitter adjustments may be coming from the growing use of things like TweetDeck, Twhirl, etc. Desktop and mobile apps for Twitter are growing and will probably continue to do so.
After comScore totally flubbed on Google’s ad impressions earlier this year, I always take their results with more than a grain of salt. Still it’s not at all surprising that HuffPo is down. They so pushed the election and was so slanted towards the Democrats that they failed to take advantage to show everyone what they are capable of and why they should come back. Plus with all their articles not getting on the front page of Digg anymore, they are losing even more people and more importantly, from an SEO point of view, a ton of potential links.
Great article. very interesting.
HuffPo has a future w/ the mainstream. Twitter, not so much.
Hmm. What does this tell us about Obama?
It says that maybe his election hasn’t been very good for high tech industry.
Which according to author Noam Chomsky in his book Targeting The Computer, is the foundation of the U.S. economy.
NS
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thank you
http://www.eskibirsaat.com
how about twitter start finding a way to generate revenue before it’s too late?
what happened to hpost was expected at least
Twitter , o Twitter, how will you make your revenue? …. I don’t want to hear another dot com bust of such well funded startup.
how dare you color huffpo’s graph red!
This is another opportunity to question Twitter’s revenue model. When the “hockey stick” was first reported a few weeks ago, everyone criticized me for asking what was apparently such a blasphemous question. I am convinced no one really understands what the revenue model is … people just think it’s cool. In terms of HuffPo, I’m not sure how they’ve managed to raise $25mm and I certainly don’t see what they’ve spent in on, but I will be the first one laughing when the shareholders realize their assets in the company are worth very little.
I’m essentially dominating on Twitter, so I’m not sure why Traffic is flat right now.
I know I definitely haven’t given a crap about politics since the election, and probably haven’t visited HuffPo once since November 4. I do still care about political news, but I’m so exhausted by the two years of nonstop election coverage that I’m more than happy to limit my news consumption to gadget blogs and sports.
People are tired of talking about the slowdown. With the automakers on the rocks — Its tough to find topic these days that galvanizes the people.
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