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Michael Arrington's TechCrunch has been the top tech blog for quite some time in terms of traffic. It has been discovered that Pete Cashmore's Mashable has actually overtaken that title now.

Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider, who as far as I can tell is the original source on this information, claims that Mashable accomplished this by offering solid content, lots of search engine-friendly how-tos, having readers in the social media industry who share everything, and having a dominating Twitter presence. He notes that Mashable is the top shared site on Twitter other than Tweetmeme.

A look at data from both Compete and Quantcast shows that Mashable has surpassed TechCrunch in unique visitors. Here's Compete's graph:

Ryan Deal, who often writes for Mashable says, "Mashable has been growing like crazy thanks to twitter popularity, its access to information, and the contributions of a slew of guest writers (like myself)." Besides the Compete and Quantcast data, Deal also points to some Twitter and Alexa numbers:

If you check out the Facebook pages for both TechCrunch and Mashable, you'll see that Mashable is also winning there in terms of fans - and by quite a large margin at that. Here are TechCrunch's and Mashable's numbers respectively:

A quick Twitter search will show an almost overwhelming enthusiasm from Twitterers supporting Mashable's achievement. It will be interesting to keep an eye on the stats for both blogs. There's no question that both are incredibly popular, and we'll have to wait and see if Mashable continues to lead by a wider margin or if the playing field is leveled.