We've been covering the steep, steep curve of Twitter's increasing visitors for the last couple of months, and it was obvious that it could not go on forever. However, seeing Twitter's growth flatline with only a 1.47% increase (up to 19,728,619 monthly visitors) is surprising, especially since Twitter-mania has all but stopped. Monthly visits to Twitter, however, have increased by a healthy 6.99%, up to 134,536,240. Of course, Compete's numbers are not guaranteed to be fully accurate, but they are confirmed by the numbers from Quantcast, for example. It will be interesting to see how Twitter performs in the following months.
Twitter does, however, have some nice numbers to show; according to Nielsen Online, total minutes spent on Twitter rose by a staggering 3712% from April 08 to April 09. In the same period, total
minutes spent on Facebook increased 699% year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion
minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.
YouTube is also doing well. Although Compete shows a minor decline in YouTube's unique visitors, comScore's analysis shows that YouTube contributed heavily to the huge increase in video viewing in the US.
U.S. Internet users viewed 16.8 billion online videos during April, a 16 percent increase over March; on YouTube alone, 6.8 billion videos were viewed, which is a 15 percent increase compared to March. Looking at audience, comScore estimates that Google's video properties have had 107.9 million video viewers during April.
Finally, Facebook has continued its tremendous growth; according to Compete, it grew from 104 million to 113 million monthly uniques; an 8.54% increase. Visits grew from 1.63 billion to 1.74 billion, solidifying Facebook's position as the number 3 site on the Internet. Once the biggest social network around, MySpace, has recovered some growth, with a lukewarm 0.46% increase in overall visits and a 2.39% increase in unique visitors (the number of total minutes spent on the site fell dramatically by a 31% year-over-year). One of the reasons for Facebook's continuous growth is its international success; there's still a lot of room for growth internationally, and we can expect Facebook to continue growing even when it saturates the US market.