Tweetmeme, Nick Halstead’s Twitter pulse-o-meter, seems to be the most popular UK-originated website in the US, according to Compete.com
His six-man firm has overtaken the BBC and The Guardian (as well as Web 2.0 superstars bebo and Wayn) to hit quite extra-ordinary reach numbers in the US.
In fact, Tweetmeme is now the 87th most popular website in the US, ahead of wsj.com and closing in on heavy-hitters like Linked In.
(For those who can’t read the above data, in July 2009, Compete measured the monthly reach of Tweetmeme at 11.9m visitors; the BBC at 8.4m visitors.)
Fantastic to see the potential for a great local success in a core ‘Internet infrastructure’ play. Well done Nick.
[update] Another positive datapoint for tweetmeme is that it’s daily attention is growing relative to Digg and Reddit, the other main meme-aggregators.
[update 2] As several twitters have pointed out , the bulk of these visits may be from the distribution of the Tweetmeme button and not visits to the www.tweetmeme.com website. But that, fundamentally, isn’t the point. Nick’s business (like so many internet businesses) depends on reach x monetisation of that reach.
Nick has found/chosen a distributed strategy that gets him massive reach at extremely low cost. Seems like a good strategy to follow, since he doesn’t control several TV and radio stations which he can use to push his website. In fact, he seems to have persuaded more than 7,000 sites to embed the tweetmeme buttons (bearing in mind that *.wordpress.com and *.blogger.com count as 1 site each).
By page views, the Compete counts the BBC at 250m per month, Tweetmeme at 112m per month, and the Graun and Telegraph at 25m or so per month. At current rate of growth Tweetmeme will hit 300m page impressions per month in August.
And as @yiannopolous has pointed out, Tweetmeme is growing faster than twitter. Given the heavy usage of Twitter by clients, there is a good chance that the total reach of Tweetmeme will exceed that of Twitter as measured by Compete in August. (Says more about Compete’s methodology than anything else.)
From the perspective of Internet entrepreneurs in the UK, it is an awesome result. Tweetmeme has a chance to become part of the fabric of the Internet, the way that Wikipedia or Urchin or Oingo or Amazon are now part of the fabric of the Internet. Fabric in the sense that they are the defacto way of doing something. The last time a British project did this was the IMDB, which was acquired buy Amazon in 1998. The IMDB is now the movie-information layer in the Internet stack. The time before that was when a chap called Berners-Lee overlayed HTTP on the TCP/IP stack.
Popularity: 53% [?]