Social networks don't seem to be driving extra traffic to help Haiti

Bill Tancer of Hitwise has reported on some fascinating data on his blog.

The earthquake in Haiti caused a huge jump in visits to US charity websites. They were up five fold from an average of 0.02% before the earthquake hit to over 0.1% on the 13th of January.

Whilst search engines continue to be the main driver of traffic, news websites registered the greatest increase, more than doubling the number of visits they drove – from 8% on the 12th to almost 17% on the 14th.

The top contributors were:

• Drudge Report 3.6%
• ABCnews.com 0.2%
• MSNBC 0.14%

Interestingly, considering the amount of coverage of the earthquake we've seen on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, traffic from these sources remained relatively static.