The following is from Forbes:

There’s an awful lot of loose talk these days about the significance of Twitter in the world of news. It broke the story of Bin Laden’s death! It emboldened Egyptians to overthrow their tyrant! And so on.

So it’s sobering to see how small a role Twitter actually plays in connecting readers with news stories. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, most big news sites only get around 1 percent of their traffic from the character-limited social service. The only outlier is the website of the Los Angeles Times, which for some reason gets about 3.5 percent of its traffic that way.

“Twitter says it had around 175 million accounts worldwide in 2010, which would make it a major online institution, but other data suggests its influence in the United States might be more limited,” concludes PEJ. (In fact, that tallies perfectly with other data showing that only about 21 million of those accounts are in active use.)

Facebook figures larger in the mix, driving anywhere from 1 percent (AOL News, MSNBC.com) to 7 or 8 percent (CNN, ABC News and, leading the pack, the Huffington Post). But if what you want is a real firehose of visitors, no newfangled social network can compete with the Drudge Report. The 15-year-old aggregator of links was responsible for between 5 and 10 percent of the traffic to the New York Times and USA Today during the period studied. It accounted for 15 percent of the traffic to the Washington Post, 20 percent to the New York Post and an astonishing 30 percent to the Daily Mail.

Then again, Matt Drudge didn’t kill Osama and bring down Mubarak, did he?

(Source: Forbes)