There is a lot of chatter about TweetMeme’s rather robust growth to over 18 million unique monthly visitors on Compete.com. That puts them ahead of well known sites like LinkedIn and gmail.com with 15 million and 9 million visitors, respectively, on the service). In fact, Tweetmeme currently sits as the 68th largest site on the Internet, according to Compete.
What does TweetMeme do? They offer other sites a “retweet” button that makes it easy for readers to send story links to Twitter. We use it on all our sites, you can see it on the top right of this post. They also have analytics around tweets sent via the service, and a home page that shows the most retweeted Tweets at any given time. It competes with Digg, TechMeme, Google News and other news aggregators to show breaking news.
But is TweetMeme really so big? The short answer is no.
Comscore tracks 721,000 worldwide monthly unique visitors to TweetMeme. Quantcast says the number is more like 2.4 million. Google Trends barely registers TweetMeme against URL shortener service Bit.ly, which is similar to TweetMeme in some ways.
We believe Compete is simply counting all those javascript widgets that sites like us include on their stories. Which means it’s basically aggregating all of the traffic stats from sites that use TweetMeme. Not so useful.
Why This Matters
Everyone is trying to take real time Twitter data and massage it into a useful, filtered news stream. Bit.ly has a new product on the way called Bit.ly Now. Digg is rebuilding the service from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter data in figuring out what’s hot sooner.
If TweetMeme is really drawing that much traffic, it puts them ahead of Bit.ly and near Digg in total traffic. And that makes them a third contender in an already crowded space.
In the upcoming war between Bit.ly and Digg (and maybe TweetMeme), what matters, besides access to Twitter’s data flow, is the total traffic base to start things off. The ability to index and categorize links on the fly is also important, and all of these companies are working on ways to properly analyze data in milliseconds, which is hard to do properly at scale.
A lot is going to happen in this space in the near future.
I only want to know if you say the name “Tweet-me-me” or do you say it “Tweet-meme”?
Tweet-meme
One Problem is that all their URL’s have the same titles of the submitted blog post making duplicate pages in the search engines.
I would put my money on Bit.ly . They account for over 60% of all Shortened links on Twitter.
With that much data it’s hard to lose, plus they have full support from twitter.
bit.ly is so unpredictable as to whether it will open, i rarely click on its links ..
I would definitely buy into bit.ly.
It’s JavaScript. Not Java. While the back-end is build on Java, the widget is JavaScript. Unrelated.
It’s not the size of the retweet that matters, it’s the motion of the data in the ocean.
haha so true… but who has the biggest data ocean?
Tweetmeme is just one big SEO farm. If i want to know what’s hot on Twitter i just go to twittersphere.com
No doubt this is exciting space.
tweetmeme is a fake – the numbers just dont stack up.
that’s what I don’t get. these numbers just don’t make sense in terms of users and the action that’s actually happening on the site.
This has been the issue from the beginning with Tweetmeme’s growth: comScore is counting installed traffic as THEIR traffic. It’s a rollup strategy, but one that’s fundamentally flawed.
When b5 added Tweetmeme and their comScore traffic jumped 5MM uniques that month, we knew something like this was going on.
They should just get on Quantcast. It’ll show all that button traffic under syndicates.
They really should get on Quantcast.
I trust Compete about as much as I trust Alexa.
I find it ironic that all the buzz about Twitter is over services that aggregate/filter/otherwise utilize its data, not about Twitter itself.
It’s not surprising; Twitter’s feature set by itself is not terribly compelling. You’ll recall that the tech industry’s initial love affair with Twitter had already peaked and was on the decline by the time it entered the mainstream consciousness.
I’m a little concerned that Twitter has become almost a web protocol rather than a service. You have all these third parties trying to monetize the Twitter data stream when Twitter itself doesn’t seem to have a tangible business model.
So much reliance on a single, privately owned service creates a massive point of failure, which is the opposite of what made the internet work in the first place.
The other problem is that Twitter’s functionality is so rudimentary and easily imitated. I think within the next 5 years traffic on Twitter will drop considerably. We’ll still have the paradigm of short, always connected status updates, but they’ll be tied to a more robust (and financially solvent) social network (Facebook e.g.)
This is the first time someone has actually been able to explain exactly what i’ve been thinking for the last year, but what twitter will do is just rip off the best ideas and then close the valve (API).
Hence why people often joke that “twitter is too big to fail”. Twitter has a business model; to convince venture capitalists that they’ll monetize, eventually.
IF twitter declines, it will be replaced by something that actually is a protocol, like pubsubhubbub.
+1
Twitter should be doing what nik said and coming out with a corporate sharing product (to beat yammer, socialtext etc…)
they better hurry before google wave gains traction in corporate environment.
It will be interesting to see the new Digg with Twitter results filtered in.
this kind of reminds me of this morgan stanley article that said teenagers don’t use twitter…
http://media.ft...0144feabdc0.pdf
hmm…
API lacks search ability. And they are very bad communicators. Can’t stand them.
http://apiwiki....-Method:-search
impressive traffic stats for tweetmeme – didn’t realize their traffic was so high
The traffic numbers are probably off but i still love what they are doing.
I don’t get the whole twitter craze personally, but tweetmeme is, I believe, a dofollow solution to twitters nofollow. That and everyone and their brother thinks they need to ride the coattails of every popular site that comes along.
Maybe this articles title should really be, ‘Its a Sunday so I won’t bother fact-checking, and if I put something related to Twitter in the title we’ll get more hits.’
Is this article about TweetMeme, the completely ‘off’ numbers of Compete.com, or TechCrunch’s usage of such numbers when convenient?
In June TechCrunch cited that gmail has 146 monthly active users: http://www.tech...mes-to-hotmail/
Now they have 9 million? Those numbers smelled fishy. I did some basic googling and came across contradictory numbers quite easily.
Considering you mention that TweetMeme’s numbers are off on Compete, TweetMeme isn’t the story. I could probably have picked a number of similarly positioned sites. The real story is that using Compete as your only data source in an article allows you to pretend to have some unique perspective on Tweetmeme to drive traffic.
you’re trying to zero in on some hate here but you’re missing. try again.
I would be very surprised indeed if there was hate for either Tweetmeme or Compete behind this article!
Although we’ve put systems in place generally for dealing with these sorts of issues, the widgetized web still occasionally gets the drop on us for exactly the reasons that you list in the original post. So:
1. We’ve looked into the tweetmeme traffic and found a way to adjust for the issues you bring up. That adjustment should be live on compete.com in a few days.
2. Thanks for keeping us honest and helping us to improve our service!
I love Tweetmeme. As the web has become more advanced, I’ve found Digg to be more and more arcaic and unuseable. Now I see it as little more than a message board. Often I’ll hear about a new story, maybe on tweetmeme or engadget or somewhere else, and I’ll be curious as to what people are saying on digg. I go there and it’s not a top story. I do a search…. oh yeah, digg has an atrocious search engine so that’s not much use.
Breaking stories don’t appear on Digg until the next day, or at least several hours later. I’m glad that they are retooling the service but it might be too late. Tweetmeme gives me an idea of what people are talking about immediately. And that’s what I’m looking for.
A good one.
Tweetmeme has achieved success due to re tweet button!
i use it on my blog and find it useful
There is an alternative. http://twset.com – it’s in beta now but do a real good job finding new stories.
What about Backtype?
Why is there such a huge difference in traffic with compete and quantcast? I could understand being a couple million off but 16 million? I don’t get it.
Hi! I’ve found another site valuation tool and it seems to provide competitive analysis for free. I’m talking about http://www.estimix.com .The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
I would like to see delicious sync with tweetmeme..