Today’s Hitwise report showing that UK internet traffic to the website has increased by 974 per cent over the last year (now the 291st most popular website in the UK), brings with it significant statistics for media and news sites:

• “The amount of traffic it sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months.”
• “Almost 10 per cent of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to news and media websites.”
• “BBC News is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com.” (i.e through re-directs)

(Hitwise report, January 2009)

As PaidContent flags up, Twitter is proportionally more popular in the UK than in the US. “This frankly could be because there are more websites or more diverse interests in the US,” comments Robert Andrews.