The emerging convention is that social media --- and in particular, Twitter --- will help deliver the news as a distribution channel. New data indicates it's a work in progress.
Hitwise, the online marketing measurement firm, has examined the path of referring sites to news and media spots on the Web. It has determined that Facebook and Google News rank ahead of Twitter in the mix.
Twitter has tripled the upstream referrals in a year, but they still only amount to .014 per cent of visits to news and media sites. Facebook's amount to 3.64 per cent, while Google News' were 1.27 per cent.
Where are the Twitter users going? To entertainment sites primarily.
Comments on the source article echo my initial thoughts after reading your summary; I immediately wondered if the data took into account URL shorteners. The author's note that only traffic from Twitter.com was measured, and not traffic from the myriad third-party applications and websites that provide access to Twitter streams, also confounds the conclusion.
I think these numbers reveal less about the browsing habits of Twitter's user base, and more about Twitter's projected success at monetizing its service.
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