Maybe Miley Cyrus was on to something, or perhaps she started a trend. But whatever the reason, Twitter's rapid rise appears to have to turned into a downward tumble, according to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen.

We're not talking about just a few Twitter users leaving the service. According to Nielsen, traffic to Twitter slid 27.8 percent between September and October, dropping from 26.2 million unique visitors to 18.9 million. Nielsen's numbers were perhaps the most dramatic, but other research firms also noted a decline. According to comScore, unique visitors were down 8.1 percent in October, while Compete noted a more modest 2.1 percent drop.

No matter whose numbers you trust, the drop in traffic is concerning for one of the hottest services on the web. But are they telling the whole story?

"While it's valuable to look at Twitter's web traffic, the true picture won't emerge until all the third-party traffic from mobile phones and API clients is accounted for," wrote senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson on the eMarketer blog.

Edit: Nothing new here. These Twitter traffic numbers were released two weeks ago, as we reported here. 

 

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