Fred Wilson Says He Gets More Traffic from Twitter than Google
From Fred Wilson’s AVC. His server stats show Google ahead of Twitter:
But Fred argues that a sizable chunk of his direct traffic (no referral URL was captured) should be attributed to Twitter since it’s likely from Twitter users that view Twitter content (and click on Twitter links) via applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitterific rather than Twitter.com.
“Last year, this blog ran at avc.blogs.com and there was no avc.com, so the direct traffic was 22%. Now it is 39%. Some of that increase is simply more people typing in avc.com into their browser. But certainly some of it is traffic coming from third party twitter clients and URL shorteners. If just 7% of the 17% increase in direct traffic is a result of twitter links that are not being counted as twitter, then it is true that this blog gets more traffic from twitter than google.”
Evan Weaver, an engineer at Twitter, claims that only 20% of traffic from Twitter to other websites routes through Twitter.com; the other 80% goes through third party applications that wouldn’t show up as traffic referred from Twitter (via Guardian UK Deep Rising Stepmom buy Raiders of the Lost Ark download ). If those average stats apply to Fred’s audience too, Twitter.com plus Twitter-via-apps traffic would be more like 40% of AVC’s total traffic instead of 8% — meaning Twitter is responsible for more than twice the traffic the site gets from Google.
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