tedr:

joelaz:

Twitter UK Downstream Traffic

Hitwise has an interesting report on Twitter based on users in the UK.  Twitter usage is exploding in the UK much like it is in the US.  This chart shows what type of links UK people click on from Twitter.  More than half (56%) of UK Twitter traffic is sent to content-driven media sites including other social networking sites, blogs, news, and entertainment sites.  Less than 10% of Twitter’s traffic is directed towards commercial travel, finance, and retail transactional sites.  Google UK, by comparison, sends 31% of it’s traffic to highly monetized transactional sites. Interestingly, Facebook traffic is far more likely to end up on commercial sites than Twitter.

Most advertising dollars and online paid traffic revenue is concentrated in these more commercial categories, so this data doesn’t bode well for Twitter’s efforts to develop a business model as an independent company.  More and more lately, I’m convinced that Twitter’s optimal business model is likely to resemble online communications tools like email and IM, which are loss leaders for big companies like Google and Yahoo!.  Hotmail, Rocketmail / Yahoo! Mail, ICQ / AIM, and other Web 1.0 communications companies were crucial acquisitions for the big portals, but email and IM aren’t lucrative businesses on their own.  I imagine, for example, that if Apple were to buy Twitter, integrate it with their other products, and provide some free, premium Twitter features only to iPhone and Mac users, that the revenue from incremental hardware sales would dwarf any revenue that Twitter will be able to generate on their own.  I’m certain that Twitter and it’s investors will do well financially, but I’m skeptical that they’ll be able to do it as an independent company.