Next Up in Twitter's Rise: Passing CNN

As we recently calculated using figures available via Compete.com, Twitter’s unique visitor total is soaring past the NYTimes.com’s this month, landing the microblogging service well up into the list of Top 50 websites. Tonight, again using Compete data, we are projecting that Twitter will pass another media giant, CNN.com, sometime early next month and crack into the Top 20 list of websites.

Assuming anything resembling Twitter’s current explosure rate of growth (76.8 percent a month) continues this month and next, it will Tweet its way past CNN, which is essentially stagnant (growing at a mere 1 percent per month), with a steady audience a bit north of 30 million uniques.

Meanwhile, unless something happens to slow Twitter down, it could well be attracting 40 million uniques by the end of May.

For those who question what Twitter has to do with the giants of the media company, it’s really quite simple. Twitter is fast becoming the online news channel of choice, particularly in the all-important emerging mobile market.

Breaking news headlines are spreading far faster via Twitter than any traditional news media can achieve. We’ve already seen how the earthquake in China and the plane landing in the Hudson were covered over Twitter before any conventional media could arrive on the scene.

Twitter is marshaling an army of citizen journalists (among other users) who recognize its power to spread news with stunning speed. Frankly, if the executives running The New York Times Co. and Time Warner, which owns CNN, aren’t reaching out to their counterparts at Twitter yet, they should be. Twitter represents the new distribution model — think of a newspaper delivery truck or a television broadcast signal on steroids.

Time may be running out. Very soon, Twitter’s reach — on the web and on mobile — will dwarf that of both old media giants combined. At that point, Twitter’s execs may not even bother ReTweeting the publishers’ requests to meet.