The latest report from Pew/Nielsen has some interesting findings. It looks like Twitter isn’t as important to news sites as we may have originally thought. Most news sites receive virtually no traffic from the microblog. The LA Times receives the most traffic, with 3.53% coming from Twitter. NYtimes comes in second with only 1.21%.

Considering 35-40% of news site traffic comes from links, things aren’t looking good for the microblog. I like Twitter and all, but I don’t think Twitter will ever play a major role in driving traffic to news sites. Twitter’s growth isn’t nearly as rapid as it once was and most people still don’t use the site. In fact, only 14% of internet users will be using Twitter in 2013 — compared to 9% in 2010.

I think we’ve seen pretty much all the site can give. It was a good run while it lasted. Of course this doesn’t completely discredit the use of Twitter. It certainly can be useful at times. I’m just saying it isn’t a major driver of traffic to news sites, and we should probably stop pretending that it is (or that it ever will be).