San Francisco  - Actor Ashton Kutcher has won the great Twitter popularity contest, becoming the first contributor to the cult microblogging site to amass one million followers.

Kutcher passed the milestone early Friday morning, just half an hour before CNN reached the same mark. The two leading Twitter contributors had been in a race to pass the 1-million mark, with the winner donating 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day later this month.

Kutcher celebrated the victory in an online video feed with his actress wife Demi Moore.

The milestone underlined the growing popularity of the Twitter site, where contributors post messages of up to 140 characters in length and distribute them to the cellphones of their followers.

According to statistics released Thursday by web tracking firm Comscore, the site now has 9.3 million users, and its growth rate in March was 131 per cent compared to a year earlier. (dpa)