Tweetmeme’s traffic surge could make it a Twitter buy target
by Milo Yiannopoulos
on August 11, 2009

Tweetmeme is receiving colossal amounts of traffic at the moment. And the numbers are still growing at an extraordinary rate: according to compete.com, Tweetmeme just saw 85% month-on-month growth: contrast that with Twitter’s own 1.25%. The service received 11.8m uniques in July, compared to Twitter’s 23.2m.

compete

Crikey. No wonder Mesiab Labs wanted in on the action. And no wonder Nick Halstead recently wound down fav.or.it to concentrate on his new product. The only question is: how can Tweetmeme possibly make enough money even to cover its server costs?

Maybe they don’t intend to. bit.ly is now Twitter’s standard URL shortener, which has led to rumours Twitter is planning to snap it up. Tweetmeme seems to be the de facto standard retweet service now, though it’s by no means the only service out there: Twitlinks, Quotably and Twitturly occupy a similar space. Surely Twitter would be foolish not to consider acquiring one of these services?

Is there a reason Twitter still doesn’t have a retweet button on its own web interface? What do you think?

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  • http://www.twitterrati.com Mark Evans

    I’d be very surprised if Twitter bought Tweetmeme, mostly because of Twitter’s track record when it comes to M&A: it’s really only made one deal with the purchase of Summize.

    The big challenge facing Twitter when it comes to potential acquisitions is supporting a larger team given no one – Twitter or potential targets – make revenue.

    My two cents.

    Mark

  • http://www.twitter.com/julesmorgan Jules Morgan

    It’s staggering growth but I’m guessing that’s not actual ‘visitors’ since the top referrers are content sites as opposed to search engines.

    Even if it includes retweets it would be very impressive, but it would be interesting to know what those figures actually represent.

  • http://www.goodwebpractices.com David Towers

    Wow, I’m really surprised to learn that Tweetmeme receives that much traffic! My suspicion is that compete.com data is overestimating the Tweetmeme traffic…

  • http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Are we sure that Compete just isn’t counting views of the embedded iframe as page views?

  • Simeon Walters

    There is no way on gods green earth Tweetmeme has 12M actual UUs visiting their site. It’s almost certainly an iFrame issue, as you have http://api.tweetmeme.com/button.js in every site that carries the Tweetmeme button.

  • Chris

    >> Surely Twitter would be foolish not to consider acquiring one of these services?

    Can you explain this? I can’t think of a reason they would want to buy one of these services; what value would it bring twitter to buy any of them?

  • David Keavney

    Duff stats…

    Google ad planner shows 2.4M unique visitors worldwide per month… (vs 66M for Twitter)

  • TM

    Thanks Simeon & Patrick – this is so blindingly obvious that I can’t believe people actually believe the Tweetmeme website gets traffic or has value. The distribution of the widgets is very impressive, but the website is average at best. I wouldnt be surprised if its under 1M uniques… at most.

  • http://azeemazhar.com/?p=334 Tweetmeme is now the most popular UK website (in the US) – azeem.azhar

    [...] as @yiannopolous has pointed out, Tweetmeme is growing faster than twitter. Given the heavy usage of Twitter by clients, there is a [...]

  • http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/has-twitters-aggressive-protectionism-come-too-late/ Has Twitter’s aggressive protectionism come too late?

    [...] week, we reported on Tweetmeme’s huge traffic surge, speculating that it could make Tweetmeme a buy target. But it seems that’s not the case: [...]

  • Tony

    Sure this is “fake” traffic comming from the retweet buttons. A better comparison at alexa.com :

    http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&r=3m&u=tweetmeme.com&&u=twitter.com&

  • http://retweet.com Kevin Mesiab

    Actually, in an interview w/ @loic, Nick from Tweetmeme reported over 50M buttons served daily. Their traffic report of 12M/mo are uniques, serving closer to 30M page views per month (as correlated by compete.com and other ranking services).

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