• TechCrunch, Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:45 AM

"If Twitter is experiencing a 60 percent abandonment rate every month, as Nielsen recently suggested, those people sure are being replaced at an awfully fast clip," says TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. Indeed, Twitter kept up its torrid growth in April, reaching 17 million unique visitors in the U.S. -- an 83% increase over March's 9.3 million uniques, according to comScore. That's down from 131% growth in March.

Also, last month, comScore estimated Twitter's global visitors at 19 million, but the research firm did not release updated global estimates for April. Twitter worldwide could now very well be past 30 million, Schonfeld says. And note that the comScore figures are just for visits to Twitter's Web site, and do not include mobile or desktop clients.

Time spent at the site has also seen a marked increase over the past few months. Visitors are spending on average 7.9 minutes a day on Twitter, comScore said, which is twice as much as in December. The research firm also estimated that domestic page views reached 428 million, up from 219 million last month.

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