Twitter Surpasses Digg in Traffic

Hitwise has shared some data showing that Twitter has surpassed Digg in terms of market share of visits for the first time since its launch. They’re not exactly the same kind of service, but it is still an interesting comparison between two popular social sites.

The data illustrates the tremendous growth Twitter has experienced within the 25-34 age demographic. This represented 12% of Twitter’s traffic a year ago, and now represents nearly 45%.

Interestingly, only 20% of Digg’s traffic is in that demographic, the same amount as for 35-44 and 45-54. The biggest part of Digg’s traffic comes from the 18-24 crowd, but only slightly more at 23%. There is a far more significant gap between demographics on Twitter’s end.

On the Hitwise Blog, Heather Dougherty says, "Also interesting is Twitter’s clickstream, where Digg relies heavily on traffic from Google (38.8% last week) while Twitter receives a higher share of traffic from social networks, which is mostly due to the applications which integrate the services.

Dougherty also notes that the mobile impact of Twitter is very large as well, and this is not documented here. I would suspect that Twitter is much more popular from the mobile angle, given it’s text message like nature.

Some around the tech circle seem to be genuinely shocked that Twitter could already be more popular than Digg, but considering the amount of attention I’ve seen Twitter get from all angles for quite some time now, I personally don’t feel all that dumbfounded. Perhaps people feel more part of the community with Twitter, because it’s not as much about who you know as much as it is simply about knowing people at all.