Techcrunch is reporting that nearly 10% of their visitors came in through Twitter in the last 30 days. This is more than any other social bookmarking site, most notably Digg and TechMeMe, and is only surpassed by the almighty Google as the top referral source.

Also in their report, only 23% of their visits come from Direct Traffic (which usually also includes traffic sources that cannot be defined by Google Analytic’s code)

So can other sites start generating hundreds of thousands of visits from Twitter?

Probably not, as I have always thought that Twitter can be used to augment a blog’s traffic if that blog already has authoritative status, ie Techcrunch. For the rest of us, accomplishing this feet is much harder, regardless of how much time you spend friending bots or social media ‘mavens’ that will automatically follow you back.

Still, there are hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter every day, sharing links, looking for cool stuff, or just talking about the weather, so I think Twitter can be one of the best places to find both qualified and unqualified readers.