After showing hockey-stick growth leading up to the U.S. Presidential Elections, Twitter took a breather in November. According to comScore, unique U.S. visitors to Twitter.com grew less than one percent sequentially from October to 1.466 million. U.S. pageviews declined more precipitously to 19.7 million, from 37.2 million in October (a 47 percent decline).
These numbers suggest that about the same number of people are still visiting Twitter, but without all the election Tweets, they are only finding half as much to keep them interested. Remember, this is just a proxy for Twitter activity, as it only estimates visits to the site, and does not take into account all of the other clients and sites where people consume their Twitter feeds.
If Twitter is taking a breather, the HuffingtonPost is winded. The political uber-blog saw a 20 percent decline in unique U.S. visitors from October to November. U.S unique visitors went from 5 million to 4 million, according to comScore. And U.S. pageviews are down 33 percent to 43 million. (Yeah, we saw this coming). Meanwhile, CNN.com was able to build on its election momentum and broader news coverage to grow its U.S. audience 11.4 percent month-over-month to 27.4 million (although pageviews are down 14 percent).
Good thing HuffingtonPost raised $25 million before the numbers turned south. Now it has to readjust to the post-election environment and broaden its coverage as well.
