Despite a couple of new changes to the site such as allowing users to curate and publish lists, and the implementation of a retweet feature, but it seems that the Twitter buzz has faded off in the United States. According to web analytics firm Compete, the number of U.S. visitors to the San Francisco-based micro-blogging platform fell for the third straight month, from 23.58 million unique visitors in August to 22.48 million in September, a staggering loss of 1.1 million users in just 3 months!
However, these estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com. It has been noted that more than 50% of Twitter users don’t tweet directly from the website. Instead, they use third-party apps like TweetDeck or Tweetie to read and publish updates. As a result, Twitter’s population could be much larger than what the analysts at Compete have estimated.
Biz Stone and Co. plans to kick off their advertising model early next year, and we are anticipating of what sort of advertising they will come up with. There could be a possibility that users will be charged for using the service, but it may do more harm than good. Of course, who would want to fork out money to pay for a monthly subscription just to tweet about their daily lives.
Scoble suggests that Twitter’s advertising model will be done through metadata. He believes the metadata would be revealed when you mouse over a given tweet. Andrew Mueller thinks that the metadata will be used to instantly generate an advertisement and it will be the ad that is revealed when you mouse over the tweet not the metadata.
Enough of Twitter. Let’s find out how Facebook fare in November. Numbers from Compete reveal that the Facebook isn’t doing well too. Although its fall isn’t as drastic as Twitter, but the California-based social networking giant posted a negative growth for the first time this year. Facebook’s U.S. traffic dropped from 128.9 million unique visitors in August to 128.3 million in September. Last week, in a rare open letter, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the site has crossed the 350 million registered users milestone, and Xavier speculated that Facebook will reach 1 billion users by the end of 2012.
It appears that MySpace exodus is rapidly accelerating. According to Compete numbers, MySpace has shed off a shocking 12.39 million users from June to November this year. I seriously can’t imagine what MySpace will become in 2010 if the trend continues.
Overall, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have posted negative growths for the month of November. It seems that the U.S social presence is declining, and I hope the 3 social juggernauts will draw more visitors as they approach a new year.
Meanwhile, not surprisingly, the number of unique U.S. visitors to Tiger Woods’s official website skyrocketed to 533,981, a seven-fold increase from the month of October (71,116).