How many Twitter followers do you have? Chances are it’s nowhere near 1 million — only seven users have that many. Oprah just joined the club as the 8th member. But what’s crazy is that she gained her millionth follower just 28 days after signing up for the service.
And what’s even more nauseating is that she follows just 11 people — 4 of which are also at or near the million follower mark. And she has tweeted just 42 times. Is she saying truly awesome things in those 42 tweets? No, it’s mostly self-promotional (like any good Twitter user), but she’s Oprah.
Oprah’s joined Twitter to much pomp and circumstance and has undoubtedly helped fuel the incredible growth of the micro-messaging service (which had already been growing incredibly fast). In fact, she made may have contributed to something around a million new members join the service, and at the very least it seems like she helped sign up a few hundred thousand.
As for the others on the million Twitter follower list, all are celebrities (including Obama) except for CNN and the actual Twitter account. The guy who was first to a million followers, Ashton Kutcher, is well on his way to nearly 2 million followers, with over 1.7 million. The celebrities are dominating Twitter.
[via Benjamin Golub]
Uhh, ya Twitter is best for promotion. It’s like an email list you can send to for free!
So?
Does it mean to rank celebrity as popular or not based on her twitter followers?
Yes 1 million is certified platinum
28 days is exact one menstrual cycle.
But all those people really follow all tweets?
Looks like twitter is down again… MG Siegler
How about another article …???
http://pipes.ya...amp;_render=rss
^^ A TechCrunch RSS feed with MG Siegler’s twitter posts automatically removed.
This is exactly the type stories that make us tired of twitter.
Do you have a brain? Do you think we care to know when Oprah passes 1 million followers?
agreed this shit is lame
lamer than commenting on shit you think is lame?
yes u are right this blog is twitter advert company and is waste of time reading it anymore….so bb
horrible comeback. commenting on “shyt that is lame” is a readers last strike at hoping bloggers will realize what they are doing SUCKS and should change it up a bit to feed real news and keep readers coming back.
i didn’t care enough about the suckiness of this article to comment on it, but to the ignorance of your response, yes.
i once loved TC.
another media conquered by the big O. congrats
George,
Here’s the thing: She hasn’t conquered anything. In all likelihood, her audience is made up of folks already following her from other outlets.
And the great thing about Twitter is that you see what you want to see, so it’s hard to conquer the platform (I think anyway.)
Of course, if someone was crazy enough to go out and meet all of their followers in person …
Who cares. Seriously.
I am a preOprah effect tweeple – #preOprah, are you?
Hopefully this hashtag will normalize twitter users for TV media effects (Oprah sign up, Aston vs CNN)
a/\/th @itbay
According to Twitterholic, she has already dropped to around 937k. I wander if that drop was anything to do with accounts being suspended?
Artificial inflation on Twitter is rife, but I guess half of what makes sites like Twitter popular is the fact that they involve some sort of pissing contest.
No, that data is just way behind.
TwitterHolic is always behind. TwitterCounter has better and more accurate stats: http://twitterc...r.com/pages/100
Why do people still refer to TwitterHolic?
that’s still way behind too.
man oh man,Oprah now even takes over the Web.
She truly Is the Queen.
Twitterholic is not a reliable source for complete information. It omits a lot of people.
I know I don’t have any right to complain, TechCrunch is free, I don’t pay anything and if I don’t like it anymore I can ditch this blog easily.
But I’m just sad, because in the old days most of the posts were very interesting, gave a great and insightful view on the tech scene and the posts were sometimes even funny andys witty, but nowadays it’s just some superficial gossip about some celebrity on twitter or boring stuff like that. It’s sad to seesuch a great source of information losing so much quality.
Couldnt agree more, u get tools like MG reporting thats what happens. Thats what happens when a little cash under the table gets passed on. YA YA we know MG i would never do that, then u must be sleeping with someone at twitter hope its not the CEO :-0
It’s the bird.
Great. Now I’ll have this playing in my head for the next several hours.
http://www.yout...h?v=2WNrx2jq184
exactly.. agree with you 100% thats why i never complain if a post sucks. but then when the writer defends his suckiness and doesn’t care about what the TC audience has to say, thats better grounds for complaint.
eh..
Twitter is no different than any industry in the offline world. The most valuable tool for monetization is fame because the majority of people are sheeple who do what anyone famous recommends without thinking.
basementdad reached 300k in less than 24 hours and destroyed ashton kutcher in the process, is this article supposed to impress me?
Since Oprah, I’m getting 85% dud replies by (very) young girls that try reply a range of teen stars (David Archie, David Henrie, etc.). When I click on my replies, all I see is stuff like that:
“hi!@david…nice to meet you!I’m came from Philippines!”
“@david archuleta…. yeah david archuleta is so very amazing singer lot of fan love’s him”
“@David love your performance!. I’ve watched those two shows.”
“OMG!!! IM SO SLEEPY AND I DONT KNOW WHAT I FEEL?! oh gosh .@David Archie I WANNA SEE YOU AGAINDAVID!!”
The list is long.
Hey, that’s what happens when have a short/common firstname twitter ID
. Most users have not figured out that they need to use a twitter handle to reply to someone, and use firstname lastname.
i can guarantee mg seiler has an iphone and has multiple twitter apps on it. MG, nobody cares what you are doing, so why dont you get off twitter, take off your stupid looking emo glasses, and get a real job instead of writing horrible articles?
oooh boy, maybe one day i can become a twitterlebrity too!!!
Oprah and Twitter were made for each other ! Schedule the marriage! Giterdone!
Juicy mayne
http://www.tunajuice.com
Keep this up and VentureBeat will eat your lunch.
How many of those million users have ever logged in a second time?
never…
“Is she saying truly awesome things in those 42 tweets? ”
No she isn’t, and neither is anbody else. twitter is pointless.
Moving on to venturebeat. Bye Bye TC.
TC has a much wider non-techie audience now than it did some time ago so I am not surprised when I see such articles. A little disappointed maybe but not surprised. I still enjoy this blog, however. It’s still among my first stops in the morning.
Look, everyone. MG writing about Twitter so much is actually really good for us.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the instances of misspellings, typos, and bad grammar present in his posts have gone down tremendously over the past weeks.
The more he practices writing blog posts, the better he gets. Then, when he posts about something that’s actually important, you won’t be distracted by his mistakes.
You gotta look at the big picture here, people. Arrington ain’t no dope. He knows how to take a mediocre writer and make them better. Practice! Practice!
Hehe perhaps thats what Michael is planning all along, but I’m visiting the blog less and less since a few weeks now. It seems like every post is a repost.
Yeah your right mark, it seems like MG is just changing a few words in every post.
This is what I call networking LOL
Dear Oprah,
Please join http://www.myre...somewebsite.com. I need your marketing power.
So what?
It was inevitable that Oprah would do phenomenally well on Twitter. I blogged about this, er, 28 days ago… http://worldtv....f_twitter_1.php
I am really struck by how negative everyone is being in this thread.
No matter how irksome it makes you to hear about Twitter constantly, how can anyone claim that the information isn’t relevant? It’s absurd.
Specifically, if Techcrunch is a blog about technology, startups and the internet more broadly, then how are stories about a new web-based communication platform hitting critical mass irrelevant? They aren’t.
Now I understand why everyone is being negative, if I had to guess I would imagine MC doesn’t relish writing about Oprah (sorry MC we haven’t been acquainted), but the fact of the matter is that Techcrunch was created to tell relevant stories. And Twitter is just relevant now.
If you are tired of Twitter being relevant, and consequently Techcrunch covering their rise, then create something that Techcrunch can write about instead.
|digitalzaar|
Though I agree that Twitter is indeed relevant (hence why I haven’t complained about Twitter posts before), the Oprah-Twitter connection made via this post isn’t so important. Who cares how long it took her to gain that many followers? What statistical importance can that show? “Omg celebrities are….celebrities…” How ground breaking is that?
There is also a greater picture to look at and reader interests to keep in mind. I have read many relevant Twitter posts before, on which people still complain (because its human nature to do so), and those complaints do irk me, but this article is far from relevant; and what irks me more is how the readers’ opinions and feedback are ignored and the level of ignorance shown in the replies to complaints, by the bloggers themselves.
Pardon me if you reply to my post and I don’t realize it, hence I don’t come back to reply. I might just not care enough to come look for an update.
Techcruch going from a million follows to none in just a month – loss of readers blamed on excessive twitter fanboying…
haha. so seriously, what do you think about twitter?
why didn’t you allow everyone click-thru to your groundbreaking website when you posted?
|digitalzaar|
Wow
Well what do you expect! Oprah is on top of her game in all avenues media wise
And, LOL @ the movie box for 28 days later. you’re so silly..LOL
When Oprah promoted twitter on her show that’s when I signed up… It was confirmation that Twitter is relevant! I love Oprah.
You’re a brave woman, Tara.
who the hell is oprah and who the f is kutcher?
that’s good let us see how much time the genuine queen @QueenRania will take to reach 1m followers
@TC for Twitter by MG…
Hey everyone we are all commenting everytime on MG’s articles. He knows what we like to read!!!!!
It just seems like yesterday that Jason Calacanis was trying to reach 60,000 followers by offering to give away a MacBook Air. Oh…those fond old days.
Look under your chair.
My preliminary research says that celebrities/top users’ accounts, in general, are growing at a slower than when Oprah joined Twitter.
Median rate of growth/week for the Twitter’s Top 500+ accounts fell from 13.35% (4/19/09) > 10.67% (4/26/09) > 9.29% (5/3/09) > 7.01% (5/10/09).
If Twitter gathered metrics like age, sex, etc… or even the heralded “referred by” that could be tracked back to Oprah… just imagine.
This is the URI stem that I’d love to see Twitter publish:
/signup?follow=Oprah&commit=Join+today!
If they converted all those to completed hits against /account/create or even the referral to /account/create think of how valuable that would be to advertisers.
You could quantify the Oprah effect just as there was a Slasdot, Digg, TechCrunch, etc. -effect-
28 days, 1 million followers, NO CLUE what twitter is all about. Half her “followers” are fake accounts, her 42 tweets are evidence she doesn’t understand what she could do with all the followers. Twitter is using the likes of @oprah and @aplusk to hype up twitter.
@aplusk leads the “social Media” tag on wefollow (http://wefollow...tag/socialmedia) that’s a complete joke! He should lead the tag “Social Control” because that’s what he is really all about. I feel like we’ve all been punk’d once again.
At the same time Twitter seems to be locking down on the common people with changes to the @replies which limits any chance of influence for common person on an extended network.
They have also crippled ability to follow people who may interest you to gain a following. They say it is needed to stop “aggressive following” but what it does it stops any common person to use twitter to create a large following. I understand their view but they should also automatically delete these fake accounts from celebrity accounts. Just take a look at Oprah’s followers http://twitter....Oprah/followers and see how many have no pictures, no followers and follow 20 people – the usual suspects like @oprah, @aplusk, @KimKardasian, @mashable, etc
I wrote a small script to predict the date you will reach 1million followers.. http://twittas.com/1million/
Try it out