An interesting thing is that with Twitter becoming a major source of traffic, the visitors' behavioral patterns also probably change – for example, producing less page views per visit. For the tech sites, this behavior pattern isn't new (see e.g. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-publishing/who-r... ), but if/when Twitter will become a major content discovery tool for the mainstream crowds, it will be interesting to see how major mainstream blogs & sites (like Huffington, Drudge) cope with that. Currently they enjoy much less “hectic” user behavior – e.g. more page views per visitor and a higher percentage of frequently-repeating users. Twitter doesn't yet seem to be a major source of visitors for them (look at the relatively low number of followers they have). Having Twitter becoming a major of source of visitors for mainstream sites will have a profound effect on them, more so than for tech blogs which “suffered” from this user behavior patterns even before Twitter.

Also, if the conclusions from the data are correct, in a way that's a problem of branding / uniqueness – if users indeed perceive Mashable and TechCrunch as directly interchangeable. Not to these great blogs' fault, but you wouldn't see this kind of effect with Perez Hilton. What can I say – we tech readers sure aren't a faithful bunch