Looking at Twitter’s visitor growth charts every month is like watching a rocket go to the moon. ComScore released its U.S. numbers for April, 2009 today and it shows Twitter reaching 17 million unique visitors in the U.S. during the month, an 83 percent increase from March when Twitter had 9.3 million domestic visitors. While Twitter nearly doubled its audience in April, its monthly growth rate did temper down from the 131 percent growth in March.
Given Twitter’s rocket-like trajectory, it is appropriate that just about two hours ago we saw the first tweet from space. But it still has plenty of places to grow here at home. As it spreads into the mainstream, it is getting a boost from celebrities and TV. For instance, now Nightline is developing a new “Twittercast” show called NightTline which will incorporate viewer feedback via Twitter. If Twitter is experiencing a 60 percent abandonment rate every month, as Nielsen recently suggested, those people sure are being replaced at an awfully fast clip. Meanwhile, everyone and their mother is trying to get into real-time search, an area Twitter seems to have a lock on for now.
Visitors are spending on average 7.9 minutes a day on Twitter, which is twice as much as in December. Domestic pageviews are estimated at 428 million, up from 219 million last month. All of these numbers are just for visitors to Twitter’s Web site, and do not include mobile or desktop clients. They also include people who visit Twitter but don’t necessarily have an account (treat it as a proxy).
Global numbers haven’t come out yet from comScore, but in March it estimated Twitter’s global visitors at 19 million, which was about double the domestic number. So is Twitter worldwide now past 30 million? It could very well be.
I don’t see a point of inflection in that curve yet. They’re doing quite well. It would be great if Twitter shared it’s own numbers too.
The only reason why twitter’s visitor data is sky rocketing is because there are so many API doing everything possible to market their client’s marketing efforts. They do this by making fake accounts and then twitting from those accounts. And everyone knows how to defeat IP crap.. which is what these APIs do.
And no wonder you dont see your friends on twitter.
If you want to see it yourself … create a twitter account and then follow as many people as possible and then see your updates would be full of crap messages …
And I am sure Michael and MG very well know all this but obviously they would never write an article describing this about twitter being nothing but a place for spam.
Dude, you are soooo true. I actually instructed so-called followers to NOT follow me after seeing the observations you made. Nice reply.
When will people be disillusioned?
Nice to see a perspective that is not awe struck (”headed to the moon”?) and at least takes into consideration that, yes, spam and people gaming the system are a partial explanation of what is being observed in the data. Thanks.
You’ve misunderstood the Nielsen research results in an important way. The Nielsen report was about Twitter *subscriber* churn. You’re confusing this with *visitors* to the Twitter Web site. These are two very different things. Nobody has said that Twitter Web site visitors are not returning.
Nielsen could have been clearer about this too. David Martin (of Nielsen Online) clarified it a bit in the follow-up video (http://www.yout...h?v=YsQKcewSQEk ): “The majority of people that sign up for Twitter won’t be around in a month.”
It would seem that there are a lot of non-subscribers generating a lot of Twitter Web site visits (”Twitter Lurkers” !).
Sean Doherty
I don’t get twitter. None of my friends use it. I think its a cool promo tool for businesses and celebs but other than that the use of it is unknown to me. Who wants to know if their friends are on the bus/toilet/eating etc. I mean who cares?
And for the search part, twitter has to go a looooooooonnnng way to become a better search engine than google. ‘Breaking news search’ is great but the most recent results often aren’t the most relevant.
Anyways I am curious what twitter will become/how it will do, when the hype is over.
idk – I am sorry you don’t get this new method of communicating in real time to everyone on the planet. To have instant access to information from top government officials to founders of companies tweeting about new projects. It is not about what your dog had for dinner, it is much more than that. I invite you to keep an open mind and remember the year 1995, Web1.0 – this is going to be much bigger. I hope you have secured your twitter domain name – because it is probably already gone.
Jan,
Remember when MySpace was the next big thing?
Oh wait.. no now its Facebook.
Wait no, sorry this just in its Twitter.
See a pattern? Twitter will come and go, as will many before and after.
I still think that today main stream is Twitter and Facebook. However, I agree, it will be interesting how they hold up in the long run.
I think Facebook to some extent has passed the test of time
Michael,
I appreciate the dialog but just to clarify, MySpace was marketed to young teens looking to “hook-up” with others outside their normal high school social circle. Facebook has garnished the stay-@-home Mom sector. FB is not really a serious professional network tool like LinkedIN – because FB has too many silly little apps that really have nothing to do with professional networking. I think Twitter’s growth is phenomenal and how they handle growth and what they do with all these “growth spurts” we will just have to see. Never-the-less “Kudos” to Jack, Evan, and Biz for bringing this revolutionary new tool to the masses.
Twitter = Restricted email (140 characters) + Mailing lists!!!
Lets get through the “Hype age” and do something real.
Michael, you have a good point – Twitter will probably not be around forever. In a few years we will be on to the next tool, however social media will not go away. The tools we use will simply evolve and grow, just as every other technology does.
I don’t want to talk bad about twitter, but i think twitter will reach the same position as facebook, myspace and others where ads don’t generate a lot of money. Google is good at ads, but I don’t know how twitter will be profitable by selling ads.
Twitter search is problematic. I mean you can’t comprehend something clearly in 160 characters unlike Google. The range of results returned by Twitter can be systematically biased like Wikipedia, where people write about what they like unlike Google where it has a lot of diverse web data around the web.
Twitters data range is very small compared with Google. It only searches 160 charaters only from Twitter users, and those users have much less data than Google for instance.
Twitter will eventually will have to come to serving ads and they might bring in money, but I don’t know if that money can cover their expenses. It think even Google is learning that serving ads on YouTube is not making a profit relative to the expense. On the other hand, Google search is a beast (tons of data).
Twitter become a 100% Google search engine. That is my suggestion.
twitter data range is not small, most useful twitts have links in them, twitter can crawl those urls
Not all ways to make money have to be obvious to users (not all income has to come from ads)
how do you know if those trends shown on the right hand side of every twitter page are actual trends.
Say for example the trend “Star Trek”, I believe that people may have been talking about the movie during the last weekend, but the trend has been extended for far too long, what makes you think that’s not a sponsored trend which could cost a lot of money for Star Trek producers? Buzz is perfect to market films
Even with that promo it’s hard to justify Twitter being worth 1 billion USD.
This thing is used by famous people just to promote their new things. “Hey fans, go and see my new movie this weekend. Ok, bye, thanks. Love ya all. Will send a postcard if movie gets 300 million in box office” Hhahah. Gotta love how Paris Hilton got sued for not promoting her film enough
Promotions go from yellow newspaper shit articles to Twitter. Big deal?
I’m not impressed unless that graph would show profits skyrocketing. Number of users just don’t cut it these days. It’s easy to get million viewers or followers if you can use your imagination and be creative.
I must say that TwitterCrunch delivered once again. How much readers do you need to lose to start working?
There are tens of billions worth of LOGISTICS tech, MEDICINE tech, SECURITY tech etc. just to make our lives easier.
And guess what? LOGISTICS tech is the thing that keeps CO2 levels down, not Google using sheep like Yahoo did do mown their grass.
Meanwhile: NASA astronaut Mike Massimino made the first ever tweet from space a little while ago, saying “the adventure of a lifetime has begun.”
Really is on the way to the moon
How much money are they losing every month not monetizing the site?
lack of ads doesn’t mean they’re not making money.
look at every link on a twitter page and think what’s already being sponsored there.
Just on free PR and so many TV mentions alone they’re making a lot of money already.
Maybe they’re already selling a live data feed to google or other partners for millions of dollars a month.
I don’t think they would’ve gotten so much funding (nowadays) if they didn’t have it together.
And even if they weren’t actually making any money, they got plenty of $$ to stay online for years
has to be at the expense of Facebook. They will lose the most if Twitter becomes mainstream.
I have no idea what a twitter should could possibly be. They better be wary of trying to grab onto this twitter phenomenon and getting it wrong.
Crazy Twitters !
Twitter outsource bandwitch and space from amazon — all twitter avatars are located there.
I think this is because of Oprah, Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN competition. The next couple of months will be interesting to see how it holds this traffic.
As soon as facebook starts offering twitter’s functionality, twitter is over.
I saw some report somewhere today that 60% of Twitter users don’t come back after the first month.
Which means, at this growth rate, everyone on the planet will have a Twitter account that they no longer use by 2011.
DaTruff Said…
I saw some report somewhere today that 60% of Twitter users don’t come back after the first month.
I saw that article on the New York Times website. How can anyone say that 60% of all users do not return after 30 days, that is utterly ridiculous. Twitter is still in it’s infancy. I love twitter it has doubled the traffic to my blogs when I post a new article. That is the bottom line.
Yes, Twitter is pretty hot right now. They will be up for a while. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t Twitter.
Erick -
As someone who tries to enjoy reading and consume technology news… is there nothing else to cover besides Twitter? It seems like Twitter is talked about everyday; nothing against them or Techcrunch and other outlets covering them, but there’s gotta more variety of coverage.
is something wrong with me or is the tech world just obsessed with Twitter and got nothing else to offer to an average Joe/Jane like myself?
Heidi
awesome
call me when they are “over the moon” tho
The question is how many of these users stay as after the second, third and the fourth month
Pity. We only grew by 23.78% April over March…with 4.69 million visitors in April…seems we’re not growing fast enough for the obligatory “OMFG look” post.
Twitcrunch
One thing great about Twitter is that it is fast and tons of information that was just instantly created by people from everyone, so you can kind of get an idea of what’s happening right now. This is faster than newspapers, TV or even Google news. It takes away complexities of Facebook and MySpace and simplifies it. It merges data from all over so there is no “one source”. It becomes a great source of raw data. But then that’s where others are now starting to catch on. There is search.twitter.com, and now there are several others including: oneriot.com, samepoint.com, tweetmeme.com, boilingpage.com, scoopler.com, etc. Each of these are trying to make the instant information available, condense it and make it less raw, more usable. Google did it earlier with Google Blog search, but Twitter has changed the face of instant information and now new ways and means of getting information and news are now available. This will clearly be a large area of business in the future for many.
Totally agree.
Look at the stats:
http://www.quan...ter.com#traffic
numbers don’t lie.
Really, who cares. Americans created the term “bandwagon.” They instinctively jump on every single one that passes, and they have been engaging in this behavior since.. well.. long before the Gold Rush.
But don’t you dare swing your cynical machete at the bandwagon, you gadfly! Without the bandwagon Martha Stewart would be baking cookies for the PTA and P Diddy would still be selling cassettes on 110th street.
Twitter shall pass… if Dee Snyder can’t last, nothing and no one can
Hey – this story was out there a week ago when compete.com published its numbers which are 19M
Nielsen’s analysis is FLAWED – think about the Twitter user base – almost all new users find twitter through a browser but most active users use an application. Nielsen can only track browser activity….
“One thing great about Twitter is that it is fast and tons of information that was just instantly created by people from everyone, so you can kind of get an idea of what’s happening right now.”
Uh yeah, that’s not “great..” that’s sacrificing your privacy. Drop the keyboard and step away from the Twitter you twit. Honestly, it is for your own good and the good of individualism in this country
I agree. People are addicted to computers and TV, are fat and don’t have friends nor socialise with other people
Twitter is just another ” can I have million virtual friends like I had in Friendster, MySpace and Facebook”.
YEAH it’s so cool. Use a phone to call your friends and meet with them. No need to Twitter about everything – YOU ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT
Now, charge 8 cents a tweet and they will make a fortune!
Oh wait…even charging 1 cent a tweet would kill the whole thing.
Another business where the customer wouldn’t pay 1 cent for the service.
But wait!…we can sell ads! And think of the value of our database – we must be able to monetize that!
= Web 1.0.
APIs cannot save a service that is worth nothing to its consumers.
“QQ – China IM Service Goes Web 2.0, With Half a Billion Registered Users!” 2007 source http://www.read...na_im_web20.php
twitter and facebook can co-exist.
I say ROCK ON TWITTER! We’ll see how long it takes for the next best thing to come through. But until then, I like the idea od riding this Twitter-train for all I can! Woot!
And yet…
Multitudes of Dittoheads claim that Twitter will not survive because of the supposed 40% of non-returning users.
Nevermind that Twitter is quickly morphing into a powerful search engine in its own right…
Till today, I still don’t know what is the relevancy of Twitter to the world, except that is cashes in on the obsession of the world with celebs.
In terms of usability, even Yahoo Answers is much more useful and relevant.
And of course, good ole Google.
Twitter’s impact is pretty amazing and has shaked up marketers and advertisers in 09.
In leiu of the discussions above regarding the value of Twitter, have you guys seen the funny “mock” twitter videos that went viral in the last few months?
Very hilarious.
http://blog.cle...the-new-twitter
twitter is the shittyish service ive ever seen. I knew TC wouldnt shut up about twitter even after posting that they would dull down their ‘erotic love’ for twitter
twitter is a bunch of crap so is TC