I know, you’re sick of Twitter data. But more keeps rolling in showcasing just how massive last week was for Twitter. The Kutcher/CNN race to a million on top of Oprah showcasing the service on Friday, likely was the biggest week ever for the service. And here’s some data to back that up.
The week before the Kutcher/CNN race, Kutcher’s Twitter page got about 176,000 pageviews, according to numbers provided to us by Compete. Last week, his pageviews rose to an incredible 3.2 million — yes, that is just for his Twitter profile page. In the same time span, CNNbrk (the account racing Kutcher) went from 61,000 pageviews to over 900,000. And Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week.
Now, Compete’s numbers are sometimes quite a bit off, but the trends are the key here. Overall Twitter.com traffic went from 367 million to over 420 million for the week in terms of pageviews. Meanwhile, unique views went from just over 8 million, to over 10 million. The pageviews on Twitter’s signup page alone went up over by over a million for the week.
These celebrities are having an amazing effect on Twitter’s growth. We crunched some numbers earlier today suggesting that perhaps over a million users signed up for Twitter following Oprah’s show.
“Twitter is poised to explode once again this month and will likely finish up over 30 million UVs for this month. If that happens they will double their March numbers and jump from #72 in our ranking into the Top 20,” according to a Compete analyst. That comes just a month after it already more than doubled its unique views (at least in the US) last month.
Wow. And remember, this data is only for Twitter’s website, it doesn’t include any of the usage from third-party sites/services (thanks, Max). Find the full web traffic chart below.
Update: The original signup pageview numbers Compete sent over were off, the updated chart is below.
This isn’t unexpected. It’s a great service. I’d be interested in seeing the effect that it has on Google’s search because more and more people will start to use twitter search.
Dude you left the other guys. Only to be the Twitter correspondent on TC?
Best Move of the Year. So far IMHO
Twitter is just on fire right now. When it cools down, there is plenty of other stuff to cover.
but for how long? this seems to be the peak of publicity that twitter will ever be able to get, and, frankly the numbers are not big enough (that’s what i think)
We’ll see. Numbers may not be huge compared to say, Facebook, but growth is absolutely huge right now. And remember, a lot of interaction with Twitter is through its APIs, which stats like this don’t measure.
Well it’s kind of THE holy grail trifecta – Oprah, CNN, and a movie star touting your goods. Couldn’t get a whole lot better PR than that if you paid for it (unless you killed someone maybe)!
LOL
The string “twitter” appears 25 times on your front page. It appears once on Om’s site. Think about it.
Om Malik doesn’t use Federated Media anymore. TechCrunc, Silicon Alley Insider, and VC venture still do. Explain the twitter conversation.
“Oprah, the latecomer, went from 5,000 pageviews (before she ran the account), to over 980,000 — which is perhaps even more incredible considering she made her debut on Friday of last week.”
what is so incredible about this? anything oprah introduces gets 1000000 hits…
she got 390000 followers, but her tweets are awfully uninteresting, and she has not yet shared a single link (the real ‘juice’ of twitter). twitter has no appeal to this kind of audience
Can you imagine what would happen to sites if Oprah started linking? I mean, Felicia Day already crashes sites. It’ll be like getting on the front page of Digg, but you only have to impress one person (Oprah’s assistant).
Hopefully all our coverage does just that.
yeah mg you are now chief twitter writer at tech crunch
Super annoying. I don’t need to know about every new Twitter account created. This is plain boring and useless info
Twitter megalomania…mania.
One of the things I like about twitter is that it has a great audience. As these celebs start joining twitter, so do the ‘undesirables’ – The blind faith people have in celebs is truely shocking and even scary. http://search.t.../search?q=miley
What funny, is that many of these twitter accounts arent even controlled by the celebs themselves, but simply ghostwritten.
I truely hope that twitter doesnt turn into a myspace, But I am prepared for the invasion regardless.
The most incredible thing about this growth is that all 3rd party measurements don’t include traffic from Twitter clients!
Yep, very true. I forgot that, will add in, thx.
ok let’s be modest here. 1M pageviews is not much. my facebook app makes more than that. i do like twitter but don’t be blinded by its shine
1M pageviews for one profile page in one week, the total pageviews for this month will be over 1 billion
Yeah, that is one new profile page in 3 days. That’s pretty good no matter who/what you are.
I don’t think the API’s are having much impact on the newly arrived oprah/ashton crowd. Those seem like people who are going to http://twitter.com/oprah not people who are downloading apps to their computers to access twitter via the API.
I’d bet the majority of the API users are the original geek crowd.
Probably at least somewhat true right now. But that will grow I’m sure.
Compete tracks ISP data, not just brower plugins. It should be included in, no?
Great question – I believe their ISP data is still limited to browser activity (it was when I worked there). I’ll let someone from compete chime if it thats not the case anymore.
You’re right. Twitstat shows that less than 30% of Twitter users access through the site. more stats here http://www.medi...twitter-matters
Surprised that there was almost no fail whale in the past week.
That’s funny I’ve been getting fail whales, slooooooow page loads, etc all week. Not to mention that 1/2 a month’s worth of my tweets continue to have been lost in the twitter ether.
The missing tweets thread in the Known Issues forum has 100+ comments!
er, 1000+ comments that is.
yes but i find myself avoiding it during USA business hours a lot of the time cuz’ so slow
I am thoroughly impressed by the viralness of Twitter, and their PR team.
Great article on the surge of interest… I have used a personal twitter account to connect with like minds but now I’m interested in how to use to market a data backup service to local businesss… just starting that project… any tips to get the right local following?
During the same period Facebook grew by 17.3 million unique visitors (source: compete.com), or 1.2 times Twitter’s total unique count.
Facebook has been having tremendous growth, ultimately I can almost find everybody I’ve ever met in it, they’re well onto their vision of connecting everybody.
Does twitter hold any patents?
Is there anything preventing a competing service from posting updates to its service and twitter at the same time?
There are many many services that do just that. Have you heard of any of them?
“Have you heard of any of them?”
Only paid glancing attention to them. Care to list them?
But my question was is there anything preventing them from existing?
e.g. twitter user agreement, etc.
twitter + data = twatta?
twitter + data = twatta?
…i use twitter – i’m not complaining, just pointing out the obvious
Hi,
The thing is that so much of the recent growth has been by a combination of having low friction to usage (email, username and password) and such massive media/celebrity hype relative to number of users and age of it’s existence.
That’s why I think that twitter will always be no more than an apendage to Facebook’s utilitiy, and when facebook mobile is available with selectable public timelines, then why need to sign up to twitter; unless Twitters own strategy is to follow the path of Google by having an incredibly simple UI and service that seduces enough users to gain traction, but then piggy-backs more and more services.
On the other hand, if the the concept of twitter is a viable mass long-term one, then really, all the mobile networks would need to do, would be to allow people to publicly post their sms’s (maybe with a “P”ublic operator) to a range of hosts (such as Facebook) with all the inclusive text allowances, and again, twitter could disappear.
Yours kindly,
Shakir Razak
So people started using google because of their ui?
Please god stop writing about Twitter. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Twitter is the current news – pushing all the other stories to the background. Even the hot iPhone iTouch has become a Twitter input story.
Thanks to my big legs and karate, I can do the splits – no problem. Back and forth…
TwitCrunch
ok, we get it. Next.
are picture comments alloud here? if not here are the links everyone please view this is what twitter is becoming TC is got stock with them obviously thats why every post by arrington and erick aka arrington jr is about twitter.
http://www.penn...08/20080423.jpg
ps. arrington posts his own comments about twitter to boost its reputation here nice work mike, i have to hand it to ya you are getting the job done and your fooling a lot of people
*allowed please excuse the spelling errors
I love seeing which celebs are on twitter, they seem to love it and post entirely too much lately though. I kind of want to unfollow most of them lol. Check out other hot celebs who are on twitter now here:
http://tinyurl....ebsontwitternow
I was talking to a bunch of high schoolers at a family party the other day and the conversation turned to Twitter. Surprisingly, none of them use it or seemed particularly interested in it.
This was so different from the conversation I had about Facebook two years ago. At the time, when Myspace was dominant, they all told me their friends were abandoning it for Facebook.
I think Twitter has some interesting applications but don’t see it ever going truly mainstream (like Myspace, facebook, etc.) if the real techno-elite (high school and college kids) aren’t the early adopters.
So why is twitter popular among the celebs.
– They do not have anything deep to say via a more long form blogs.
– The one way direct link to their audience is better than having a middleman like esquire manage the relationship with their audience
– The celebs get a chance to gossip like eberybody else
– All of the above
agreed.
Double Impact… great movie! (kidding)
Yea yea yea blah blah blah…. wake me when they start to make money.
Until then, this is page 6 news.
I hereby coin a new phrase….
“Don’t be a tw@”..twat,..aka..a twitter douche bag.
Double its monthly traffic and increase its costs. My question is, where is the business model? And can this site be duplicated?
I love Twitter but what happens next for them?
Constantine from Music.us
Currently Twitter is popular in the way that tabloids are popular. It will make money, just like the tabloids make money. However, it remains to be seen if Twitter is going to be a source for fact-rich information like product specifications, reviews, statistics, etc. Thus, at this point, Twitter is not the “next Google.” Its traffic is perhaps as valuable as facebook’s traffic is—twitter is an atomization of facebook.
I dont see very many professional fashion twitter’s happening. I’ve been observing the fashion twitter area for quite a while now but still a lot of people just talking about their lunch. There are a few tweets that are sharing valuable news and linking back to their blogs, like 360fashion.net are doing, but not many that I have discovered yet. Still no fashion models besides anina.net on the scene.
It’s not the new Google, it’s the new Pets.com. I hear they had great pageviews after their superbowl ads too.
Biz: We’re doing great this week.
Ev: How great?
Biz: We’ve lost twice as much money as we did last week!
I just don’t get why anyone would want to follow a celeb on Twitter. It seems to defeat the purpose. It’s not like they are going to interact with you in any way.
Actually, a few nights ago Lamar Odom from the Los Angeles Lakers was interacting with fans from like 11pm to 1am.
If a lot of celebs do that, Twitter would be a cool tool for celebs and fans.
this whole twitter thing might be getting a BIT out of control.
My views on the same sujbect
Twitter is buzzier than Facebook thanks to Celebrity push!
http://tinyurl.com/cfuz9y
Uninteresting people on Twitter (”Stars” and “Celebs”) will make Twitter less interesting.
Then Twitter is no longer cool.
The early adopters need something new now.
An estimated 30 million UVs this month, that’s bigger than Digg right?
Will be interesting to see how much traffic they retain after the buzz dies down… I wonder how many users will just sign up, read a few tweets, think its stupid and then leave Twitter alone.
What’s Twitter?
We have only just seen the tip of the Twitter Iceberg. This is the beginning of one of the most interesting and fascinating social phenomena’s we will see this year.
It doesnt surprise me that traffic to Twitter has increased especiall with iPhone applications like “Twitterena” fuelling this
by the way if you want to try the Twitterena app come over to http://www.whic...e_giveaway.html and grab a promo code for free.