Twitter’s march towards world domination continues apace. This morning comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone.
These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (a large portion of users). But the comScore numbers provide a good proxy for Twitter’s overall growth, which was helped recently by Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million followers, and Oprah’s subsequent adoption of the service.
If Twitter can keep this rate of growth up, it should cross 50 million visitors by summer.
Such impressive growth! Thanks to the entire Twitter team for giving us such a brilliant platform to develop for!
Justyn
Twindexx.com
Growth all is fine. Please ask them to fix the bugs as well. That would avoid irritating users.
People really need to remember – re: Bugs, fail whale, etc… it’s all par for course of a – FREE SERVICE. Don’t forget that – you are NOT paying a dime to use twitter at this time. Enjoy it, and if it goes down, enjoy something else!
Thanks for the note of support, @RexDixon. I’ve found some bugs and figured out some workarounds.
I’m leaving Twitter for a month’s vacation. Perhaps we’ll have access to the Internet where we’re going in Utah, but not sure.
I’m sure I’ll miss it. It’s fast and easy and fun!
Warm regards,
Ellen Kimball
Portland, OR
Twitter Fever is increasing everywhere
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
I guess by the year end Twitter would be in the Top10 websites all over the web!
Yes, an increase to 19M visitors sure means they’re almost in the top-10 sites.
Seriously people, lay off the drugs. 19M is nothing. How many visitors do FB and MySpace have? How many do Yahoo and Google have?
Top 10. WTF ever.
But the parabolic growth is what counts. http://iamned.com/blog/ more proof the whole recession could be fake
What does this have to do with the recession at all? Growing users and pageviews is not guaranteed to make money.
It’s twittermania!
Amazing what a few celebs can do to the world.
Certainly some of the growth was fueled by celebrities, but much of the growth was twitter’s own accomplishment. Estimates were that the Oprah episode only raised usage by 5% over the week prior.
only 5%
LOL, 5% in one week is pretty amazing for one person…
hahahaha that’s the power of celebrities
is not the celebrities is the power of the fans.
Correction, it is the power of the celebrity’s fans
‘These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website…’
Is there no way that figures from people that use the Website, desktop clients and mobile applications can be published?
Wild guess – 5 to 10% of Twitter users actually use the website.
Active users count most — however, this growth is stellar. Are they prepared to capitalize on this now? Would be most interesting to see them implement a retention strategy that really grabs followers and those who “lead” most on Twitter.
If new sign-up count is a good indicator of growth is the lot of brown-blue–circled-faces in profiles an indication of engagement (or lack thereof)?
According to Tweetstats, Web tweets account for 58.1 percent of tweets.
I still don’t get it.
50 million??? Is that possible?
Many people estimate 150 million in 3 years
Many people believe The Rapture is around the corner. Now shut up.
Top website platform or not, does it really matter if you’re not making any money from it? Isn’t that the ultimate goal?
There model is going to be harder than Facebook’s to monetize. Why isn’t anyone ever talking about this?
Google did not monetize its platform for almost 4 years. Amazon.com for longer than that. Naysayers were banging the “where`s the revenue model?” drum for years about those companies too. Twitter is building live relationships to millions of people – companies/advertisers are coming on board in droves to build commercial relationships. Put 2 and 2 together, clearly some of the smart venture investors who backed Twitter already have.
Both Amazon and Google always had a revenue generation models in place. The only such model I have heard from Twitter is charging for premium memberships. Good luck with that.
You use Google and Amazon as if they are standard businesses. They are anomalies in the online business world. Take mighty Facebook for example, they are experiencing exponential growth as well, but the way they are monetizing their content is costing them millions a month. See: Techcrunch’s article from last week.
Granted I enjoy Twitter, but to say that they don’t have to generate revenue for 4 years and will live off of VC capital is simply ignorant.
You are right. Amazon did have a revenue model in place but it took years until it came to fruition. Google did not have a working revenue model in place for about four years and I recall that even the Sequoia and Kleiner guys were extremely nervous. I don`t like silly businesses either but I convinced that these guys are sitting on a goldmine. Anyway lets not accuse each other of being igorant. Lets just wait and see. Inevitably we will find out who is right in the next two years and we are both on record in this thread as having stated our position.
Amazon was in the business of selling books from day 1. It was only a question of could they do it profitably–could they see some real margins.
That isn’t even in the same ballpark as Twitter. Twitter as of now doesn’t even know what their business model is.
My intentions were not to personally call you ignorant and I apologize if my wording offended you.
I too will agree they are sitting on a goldmine, but so is Facebook. It’s just a matter of monetizing such a business model and quite frankly no one has really figured it out yet.
That is my problem with many of the networks, as great as they all are, if they can’t sustain themselves and reach profitablity, then they will eventually be gobbled up by the big boys for data mining or two they will ultimately fail.
Google is different, in that it’s a destination rather then a service.
The value of twitter comes from it’s open aggregation. I very rarely look at pages on the twitter.com domain (most of my interaction with the service occurs on feeds and apps).
Sadly, this means the only way to monetize it would be:
(a) Injecting ad’s into the feeds (barf).
(b) Moving to a paid subscription based model.
(c) Conceptual reinventing the service so users have incentive to hit the page, rather then read the feed.
It’s an interesting challenge, and I imagine its very frustrating.
You miss out on the actual value direction. It’s not the service that makes the money. It’s what you do with the content and aggregate data.
Their customers will not be the people with twitter accounts but with businesses who want to mine the data.
And the longer the service is up, the bigger the mine.
Google’s product was never search, search was a way to build data, google sells ads targeted by learning about the front end users. They don’t sell to the front end users. Why would twitter?
Yes, but then you run into privacy issues and what does Twitter currently have in their user agreement covering such details?
I really don’t know, I’m just asking.
GOSH!!!
Currently Twitter is #65 in Alexa global rankings. I’m sure it will be into top 30 in other few months
And then, some day in 2010/11, twitter will be forgotten and nobody will care
Pretty sure you’re right. Twitter has 2-3 years to go before people drop it.
I hope so, fingers crossed it takes less than 2 years!
GOD i cant wait for twitter to be burned to the ground, what a stupid service that people jizz over…oh my god Ashton is on twitter , lets see when he takes a shit, cant wait to hear about it!!!
Lame!
I will commit suicide when that happens.
This graph reflects growth BEFORE the Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN event and BEFORE Oprah feature it on her show and BEFORE Ashton and Diddy and Fallon went on Larry King.
Thank you Oprah.
Oprah, the refuge of scientologists and retards. Nice spokesperson for Twitter.
Attallah, as a media person myself who was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 1981 when she co-hosted a show in Maryland, I don’t know why you are making that charge.
Obviously, Oprah is popular and a real “touchable” personality. She has tackled a wide range of people-oriented stories, doctors, personalities, celebrities and unknowns.
Perhaps she was “taken” once in a while. I had to retract one radio interview I did on with a doctor who was publicizing “The Last Chance Diet.” That book ended up being responsible for a couple of deaths. All media people have these scrapes if they are on long enough.
Oprah’s success is measured by TV viewership and commercial success. Look at all the people who went down — Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Sally Jesse Raphael, Rolanda, etc. and many more couldn’t make it on daytime TV.
What is your REAL problem with her? Sour grapes? Race? Jealousy? Not covering your particular lifestyle in the way you want it explained? Just not interested in her topics? What is your life situation? I don’t know you from Twitter. These are not insinuations, just something you might think about.
I’m a 69-year-old grandmother and retired broadcaster who has followed Oprah’s TV career almost from the beginning. I don’t watch her show as much now as I used to, but I am convinced she is certainly an inspiration and a reality touchstone for many millions of people all around the world.
Good-bye and good luck!
Ellen Kimball
Portland, OR
100m by Xmas and overtakes Facebook 2011 for sure.
Unless it gets completely abandoned after the Great Twitter Virus of 2010.
These are all real flesh and blood people? Right?
Wow. What a time to be alive!
There may be millions of people on Twitter, but if you know how to do the right Google search, you can pick out exactly the people you want to reach. It is an amazing lead generation tool. All you have to do is look for the right patterns in user bios. for example to find all the lawyers, you can search for:
(intext:”bio * legal” OR intext:”bio * lawyer”) site:twitter.com
I’ve written up this complete procedure for creating Google Alerts based on these searches on my blog:
http://www.aler...alerts-twitter/
The great thing about doing this with Google Alerts is that you will be notified as soon as a new bio is created or edited with your keywords. This lets you follow people when they have a new account, which is when they are most likely to follow back.
So in time Twitter bios will be a directory for millions of professionals. It is so light weight that it may replace Facebook for people’s “home page” online. Best of all, it doesn’t insist on your current sexual preference and marital status. I’m sure a lot of professionals are not that interested in publicly announcing their preferences in hooking up.
The advertising implications of knowing the bios of millions of people and being able to deliver selective “follow lists” will be huge. Right now Twitter auto-follows celebrities when you create an account. I’d rather auto-follow potential customers.
Brilliant!
Great post! Thank you.
Adam,
Good point. I’ll put this on practice.
Thanks for the tips.
Wow! That is really amazing!
That is really impressive. It will be interesting to see what effect the increased use of apps such as TweetDeck will have on the twitter.com figures.
On another twitter note, one of the TwitterJobSearch developers has been at it again http://bit.ly/ngcTK
Oh my God! Facebook and Twitter are really the TWO BIG THINGS … very interesting
The best website is twitter. Better than Facebook.
It’s really amazing!
Sorry, it just means that you’re an useful idiot for using twitter.
Wow amazing growth, twitter is definitively growing huge outside of the US.
I’d guess-ti-mate there’s at least another 25% of users who only tweet using 3rd party apps (i.e. Twirl, Tweetdeck, Twitterberry etc).
With the phenomenal growth of Twitter users one has to conclude it’s only a matter of time before Google slaps down some big $$
Oh man it makes sense to me. Twitter has helped me find so many friends and other artists. it is a good site
Http://afremov....12o338n921a2009
Afremov, you just being a loner that doesn’t connect with people. Get out from your computer screen and try to socialize with people in real life. You seem like a sad fella.
Yeah with so small budget started and now growing and growing so fast
Good work.
Odd that such a useless (outside of 16 year olds really) service for real, meaningful communication is growing so quickly.
Useless?!
Understanding marketing: FAIL!!
One must also note that the big and irritating changes came to facebook during this feb-march period which forced facebook users to look for the other social site and Twitter was a hit !!
It’s really gaining momentum!
Fantastic growth and yet another reason to tweet daily!
It is the simplest medium to follow and let know to friends that what you are doing.
The downside is is works in most of the cases for the people who always connected to net and that is why most of them from USA.
Jeeze, that’s insane. Twitter is all of the place, even in science now: http://bit.ly/I9G0K
It’s called the Brain-Twitter Interface, twitter with your thoughts…
Since now so many people are Twittering. It needs some etiquette to be followed
Here goes my list of Twitter (N)etiquette are : 7 Essential Twitter Netiquettes [ http://bawaal.com/blog/?p=122 ].
Let me know what you think about it.
Wow!!!! Twitter is growing like a rocket.
… HAHAHA, SOON IT WILL REACH THE SPACE!!!!!!!!!!
I just started using it and find it pretty neat. It’s just so buggy, either that or then can’t handle the load at the moment.
By Jan 9, traffic wasn’t impressive at all – I know a lot of emerging properties in the world reaching the 7M+ uniques level without all the hype Twitter got.
Current growth is strong, but exponential growth curves are extremely hard to predict. I do not see real adoption of the service, rather a lot of bored people trying it and giving up.
With too much time in my hands, I made a quick little survey… Not quite scientific, yet interesting:
I searched the people who wrote “I’m new to twitter” one month ago, on march 28/29th (weekend). I scanned through the 20 first answers and almost all of them were actually twittering for the first time on that day.
How are they using twitter one month later?
- 5 are really active (100+ updates in one month)
- 2 are active, ~20 or 30 updates, with regular intervals.
- 9 barely used the service (1-3 tweets during their first week and gave up)
- 2 closed their account
That’s 19, so I guess I missed one
Someone should do a better job and tell us what all the new twitterers are actually thinking
I smell a bubble.
Funny how these numbers match so many other charts we’ve seen in the past.
Hopefully Twitter can monetize it while the getting’s good… Otherwise, they’re going to be hurting ‘if’ this pops.
how does this compare to signups? can we have a graph of both? the visitors bubble was expectable – twitter peaked in all the mass media in the past month, something that is unlikely to happen again. But, will these visitors convert to users?
If I could invest in Twitter I would short it to all hell.
its only a matter of time when the blue bird is shot by a gun, and fall faster then its climb…
If you really think about, people who use it have no life following people they dont know, and jizzing their pants when Ashton post that he’s shit smells like a taco.
twitter sucks its overrated way to much
What do you think about (the name) Twitter?
http://onthebut.../04/24/twitter/
Exponential growth means extreme cash requirements. Are those famous investors ready with their checkbooks?
Twitter has enough capital reserves to weather the current storm, but if their growth continues along this curve and they fail to develop a business model, they are going to be in trouble fast. Aside from the growing expenses, there are extreme engineering challenges to be faced in order to scale a website to handle demand of this load. Given the state of Twitter’s current IT department (let’s be honest, they aren’t ace), they are going to need to find some top talent and fast.
That being said, I highly doubt their traffic growth will continue along this curve, and honestly feel this will be the greatest month to month growth they ever see. In fact, I don’t think it is unrealistic to expect negative traffic growth next month.
If Twitter isn’t acquired within the next 6 months, they will go under within the next 2 years. You can quote me on that.
- Anon
Our company has just integrated Twitter onto our SEM platform, “LXR Retail.” We can now track how many times and where people are “tweeting” about our clients and run geo-targeted online ad campaigns. Seems like Twitter is definitely here to stay and then some.
“These numbers only count visitors to Twitter’s Website, which is not the same as active users and also does not include people who interact with Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (a large portion of users).”
So what IS the number of people who interact with Twitter via clients?
that’s a hockey stick for the ages…
holy crap…
Check out chart of their backlinks growth, tells the same story: http://tinyurl.com/cfcc8o
Fantastic growth, but what’s the TOTAL visitor number including browser users AND application users? I think Twitter’s selling itself short if it doesn’t release the real and complete number, as many power users and early adopters loyally use external applications to Twitter, not the browser.