Twitter grows 93% in six months in UK

Twitter has almost doubled its UK traffic in the first half of 2009 as it posted a traffic increase of 93 per cent.

According to Hitwise, the micro-blogging site was the 38th most popular site in the UK over the six month period, although it will surely be disappointed to be only the fifth biggest social networking site.

However, when compared to the same period last year, the site was only just inside the top 1000 most visited sites at 969.

Which sites are these?

It was also only the 84th most visited social networking site in the UK, which leads to the obvious question: how on earth are there so many sites in this category? We can only count eight...

The report only takes into account traffic directly to the site, so users of the likes of TwitterFox and Tweetdeck would not have been included in the report. Given the amount of people that use such a portal (not least on their mobile phone too), this means the numbers could be much higher.

Hitwise's report also noted that over half the traffic from Twitter actually went to other media sites, with users often posting links to news, pictures and videos.

However, only 9.5 per cent of traffic went to transactional sites, but at least the company is now planning to monetise the service.