Speculation about Twitter’s new round of financing is leading everyone to speculate on Twitter’s actual penetration into the “mainstream,” or lack thereof.
Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year, albeit from a minuscule base. Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors. Comscore puts the worldwide number at 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in March.
None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients like Alert Thingy, MySocial24×7 and Twhirl. Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.
The key measure of Twitter usage is total users, total active users and total messages sent. And according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats:
March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users (see comments below). It may be users who’ve left at least one message, or an active user number that is over a longer period than the weekly number (monthly, for example). Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size – In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users – they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.
The company has not blessed these numbers, nor do I expect them to. If they respond to my email request for comment I’ll post an update here.
Update: Twitter declined to comment.
Update 2: Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider adds another interesting stat. There are 4 million connections between Twitter users (Twitterers following other Twitterers, with some duplication obviously), based on a slightly higher number of 1.3 million total users three weeks ago.
I am pretty sure, the numbers presented now would eventually double in forthcoming months. Not only is the application addictive, the third-party services around Twitter are growing at rapid speed making users to join and be active in Twitting!
Much higher than I expected.
Seeing how many people do use more than one account for different reasons, that makes the users number even lower than that.
Great numbers and growth, but how will it be monetized enough to get back that huge valuation that’s expected by its investors?
Funny that I was directed to this post via Twitter itself. One giant feeding another — not a bad thing, I guess.
Arrington, you’re delusional. twitter isnt popular, i dont know ANYONE who knows what twitter is, but im sure you do considering the only people who use it are usually employed in California or any other “valley”
Mike,
Those are some cool stats, but they’re only useful if compared to something else. Can you let us know the stats of some other social networking sites to make the data more useful.
Thanks,
– Greg
Wow, these are a lot lower than I expected, I suppose the activity doesn’t translate into unique users. What is a lot more surprising is how much they grew since January, those are impressive growth numbers. No doubt that twhirl and other 3rd party apps helped that out.
Wow – the user/active ratio is a lot better than Second Life and MySpace . . . wonder if it has something to do with the time is takes just to use it?
Twitter Is Not Important {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/zqBy9qBXF6_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Twitter Is Not Important ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/EYIvuV9qY7″}}}
So it’s 20% users , what’s the big deal and “only one million users accross the world. it’s certainly going to grow much bigger. My question is : is this the twitter week , theyre is such amazing for few days now. Is this only about the internal founding or more ? what’s comming next ? Is twitter going to replace phone ? .. really …
@Alex. I had the same thought.
I thought the total user number was nearly 7 million. I know at least TwitterHolic says I was the 6 million+ user to sign-up.
Greg – my guess is Twitter does more messages per day than have been done on Pownce forever.
Comment on TechCrunch: Tehe Real Twitter Numbers {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/i0Ga22yBAI_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Comment on TechCrunch: Tehe Real Twitter Numbers ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/A4btducaM4″}}}
Twitter’s adaptability is it’s most powerful asset. With “qwerty” smartphones getting more and more affordable, mainstream will only be a matter of time. Wait until there’s a Silverlight twitter app…
To look at this from a different perspective, these numbers actually seem really low to me, given twitter’s well publicised stability and performance issues.
How are they struggling to handle that load!? 2 million 140 character messages == not a lot of data. Yes, they have several input and output formats to deal with but come on… It’s surely a small enough problem that you can just throw some servers at it with some of that $5.4m
Brad – I’m not sure how the “total” number is being calculated. That may be people who’ve sent at least one message, for example. looking into it.
from looking at userid’s it looks like they are currently around 14million
Last may when I registered userid’s where around 5 million.
Ratio of actives to registered? Is this low or high for a site like this? What does facebook/myspace do?
OK, the Video comments are cool. Arrington, you rock…
If Compete is right, my personal blog is 1/3 as large as Twitter according to Adsense. And I’m just one guy without financing.
I think the idea that Twitter will never catch on outside of Silicon Valley is probably shortsighted. While most of the people who I know who use it are techs, I definitely know (in real life, not just via Twitter) a few non-tech people who use it, one of whom uses it quite profusely.
As others begin to adopt Twitter, non-tech communities will develop. At some point, I would imagine you’ll find people posting links to great cooking tips and asking baking questions, in the same way you can do that with tech issues now.
Is this The Unofficial Twitter Weblog or techcrunch.com…the lines have become blurred and I am no longer certain. Enough posts about twitter…you’re obsessed and your news is getting diluted.
20 articles this month are on twitter. ENOUGH!
I think the video comments are gimmicky and will end up being ignored for the most part. They’ll be ignored by me anyway. Unless of course their is a hint of breasts under that big play button (not Arringtons).
Nathan, news is news. These numbers are much lower than I expected.
I KNOW that there are 3,780,000 users on Twitter, and i can prove it! Sounds like spam, but i have a way…serious, that is how many they have.
JC – show us how you are getting to that number.
FYI, “visitors” metrics are misleading because nobody agrees if that’s a unique IP for the hour, day, month, etc. Most stats programs look back a few hours for IP matches, that’s it. It’s not like they take an entire month of data, sort it and drop duplicates.
Thanks Mike for taking a look. The first time I saw TwitterHolic’s numbers I was suprised that many people were using Twitter. When I look at number of users where I live I see about 20 users for a 100,000 population. That seems pretty small compared to other services. Might just be the city though.
JC sounds like he’s kidding, I think that was sarcasm.
@no gphone you sir, are uneducated. do some more poking around.
okay now for my traditional post every time Arrlington does an article Twitter (which I think is about once a day now)… TWITTER IS STUPID. Get over it. It is a feature of Facebook that cannot be monetized and no one outside tech geeks use it.
Twitter is really great at what it does. With just a few adjustments to be made to the API (AuthSub?). It is one of those programs that works the way you want. But once it needs to advertise or other money making schemes is really what is going to hurt it in the long run. When it comes to advertising, I really don’t want to have Ad Tweets messaging me, or having ads added to the end of an entry.
jb, for now, and for a while, you’re going to have to hear about Twitter here because at least several thousand in the Twitterati seem to read every story published about it. It’s apparenly good for blog traffic whether you’re a huge site like Arringtons or one that’s smaller. Otherwise…we wouldn’t hear much about it at all. Twitter is this years Segway — another product loved by the digerati that got massive media coverage for a while.
I’m guessing when the new iPhone comes out, we’ll see less Twitter coverage
But I’m on Twitter. That’s worth a few million right there.
Then you got my homeboy Snoop Dog on Twitter, he follows nobody.
Snoop tells me he’s TechCrunchin’ my munchkin!
I agree with Chacha. Just freakin’ get OAuth support finished. I for one will not be asking my users for their Twitter passwords and store them cleartext. Twitter employees was quite involved in the OAuth standard, shouldn’t be that hard.
I’m sure a fair number of these Twitter accounts are also just plugged into RSS feeds via Twitterfeed (or something like it). Of course, those would be active accounts, but no one’s really behind the wheel using them.
@Nathan I agree… there are so many articles on twitter on techcrunch. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Mr. Arrington has personal money invested in seesmic, the company that now owns one of twitters’ most used clients, twhirl.
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
=
21,000,000 msgs per week from 200k users = 105 msgs per user per day.
someone is off. we filter 300k non-asian msgs per day fwiw
)
mogilny – that’s quite a creative stretch. well done.
@Nicole Simon why would anyone want to use more than one account other than a dodgy german like you who likes to spam people with your alter(native) ego accounts.
Lose weight you fat cow. Get off twitter and get on the treadmill. Do everyone in Germany a favor and logoff please, you give us Germans a bad name.
Twitter is not stupid nor is it used only by tech people.
Maybe my math is wrong and I don’t understand much about scalability, but 3million messages comes down to about 3GB of data transfer a day:
140 Characters * 8 Bytes = 1.12KBytes
1.12KBytes * 3.000.000 messages = 3.360.000 KBytes / 1000 = 3360MB
3GB a day does not seem much to have scalability problems IMO. Could someone explain why they have so many issues with this?
Fabian, there are several good blog posts concerning twitter’s problems with scaling – they write each message for each follower, etc.
Loren Feldman you rock! Go yid go! Also why does twitter matter. It is very often a voyeuristic conversation at best especially when you follow people who do not reciprocate. It’s only the A-list that broadcast and treat it as an alternative RSS. it that think it matters.
The best thing you can do on twitter to increase its value is to block arrington. calacanis and scoble. The noise ratio decreases and the intelligent conversation increases.
Twitter is not only popular in Silicon Valley — it’s HUGE in the Fraser Valley too (Langley, BC)!
I think that their traffic will deff increase. They are getting a lot of good press, especially from TechCrunch.
@Fabian :
You only counted incoming traffic…
Messages are not only *sent to* twitter, you know.
Unfortunately. Most of them would better never go elsewhere…
Many clients read them ! (I don’t think any sensible people read them for anylonger than 2/3 days, it’s just client software that ‘read’ the twitts).
And that is traffic too.
@fabian thats 3gig of db storage a day not bandwidth
also mike this line doesn’t seem right “Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.” RWW did an article on it they say 50% still use twitter.com as the client
what does it have to do with http://www.shopandsave.com
i think shopandsave.com is will sell its secure technoligy as twitter may have an issue with its users.