How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueek, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009. Fast-forward to April, and Twitter’s U.S. visitors alone reached 17 million. Now comScore has released its worldwide numbers and it estimates Twitter’s global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009.
To put that in growth into perspective, Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors, as counted by comScore. And comScore only measures the number of people who visit Twitter’s Website, not the millions more who send and read tweets via their phones, desktop apps, or other Websites. Twitter.com is also now bigger than Bebo and Friendster, for what it is worth. Who will it pass next?
Its getting so big that its growth rate is beginning to temper. In April, Twitter added 13 million visitors, which is more than the 9 million it added in March. Its month-over-month growth rate, however, slowed to 68 percent from 95 percent the month before. Still, if it can keep adding 10 million global visitors a month, it will easily pass 50 million this summer and 100 million by the end of the year. No wonder everyone from Facebook to Google is looking over their shoulders.
What goes up must come down.
I wouldn’t bet on it. At least for awhile. Twitter is still very, very young at this point. That growth spurt will likely continue for a few months before we see any real deviation from the trend.
Only 32 million!! I thought with everybody going gaga over twitter it would be many more “visits per month”.
btw… twitter is a nice name for mailing lists.
gone are the days of digg+fb hype…
It is mailing lists for the dummies, but it makes it accessible for your grandma.
problem with digg is that floods my rss reader. maybe i should be able to reduce rss feed to top 5 instead of top 10. and rss link goes to comments page, instead of digg bar iframe, whats this, those newspaper site mentality????
A mailing list is a the Internet for dummies and 1995.
Yeah, that’s only LIKE, a tenth of the population of THE ENTIRE USA! =P
I know, I know, we’re used to hearing 200 million and the like. But remember, most people you meet, you know in ‘real’ life, have no clue what Twitter is at all. Or at best, they have a vague and limited concept about it.
Any growth trend such as Twitter’s is LITERALLY nothing short of revolutionary.
Looks like a comment to stock market.
Well web site traffic is a little different. The more the people use the faster it grow. The media talks about twitter a lot nowadays. I guess that contributes a lot to its traffic. I am planing to set up twitter on my blog…
Twitter is extremely powerful not only for building communities, but for SEO, real time conversation tracking, and hashtag conversations.
The only other Social service out there that compares is FriendFeed.com, which in some ways is better then Twitter, more features on the site, but less 3rd party developed apps.
It’s inevitable! You are right… !
If you have not seen the interview with @biz during a Reuters interview he mentioned… “If this growth rate continues week over week, we’ll run out of people on planet Earth to sign up to Twitter by the end of the year”
That’s staggering!
The price tag on Twitter just went up a couple BILLION dollars. No big deal.
Erick,
As you pointed out, the amazing part is the fact that a lot of twitter users never even visit twitter.com!
I think it’s really unlikely that an active Twitter user will not go on the website at least once over the course of a month.
I have to wonder though if that thinking still holds true. With all the influx of people following Oprah and AK, maybe more people are using the website than before.
It takes a certain commitment to downloading an Adobe Air product like TweetDeck. Most non-tech people will just go to the website; they might not even know what an API is. HA!
Let’s remember that these are comscore numbers, which are estimates and based on panel-data. It’s all pretty much made up.
If the numbers were real they would not round up to the closest million.
puleeze.
We all know Twitter is huge, but let’s not get carried away with estimates based on extrapolated data.
Apple may want to reconsider that $700M offer…
Is Twitter still up for sale, or was that just a rumor?
Apple has absolutely NOTHING to do with this. They should absolutely NOT buy twitter and for what’s it worth, they don’t really know how to run proper web apps.
They shouldn’t get into the social space, it’d be a headache, a waste of time and a waste of resources.
Just like they “aren’t making a netbook” – Apple isn’t looking to “buy twitter.”
>they don’t really know how to run proper web apps.
Hi. Can you expand on this? This seems a rather offhand statement.
who is their pr firm anyway? they have done one helluva job.
“who is their pr firm anyway?”
TechCrunch.
Allright, this was too easy…
lol…TC does cover twitter a lot..but for the most part its legit news…FWIW they write about twitter simply because it matters and everyone’s talking about it.
TechCrunch (along with any other “tech” news/blogging platform) talks about Twitter incessantly because it generates interest and traffic to their website and articles… PERIOD!
It’s the hot topic of “today”… therefore, It’s the key Click Bait topic generating views, which (bottom line) generates revenue.
lol nice one.
I’m glad TC is here to report on every Twitter employee’s bowel movements – what would we do without minute-by-minute snapshots of what this company is doing?
I hope they’re getting paid handsomely by Twitter for all the product placement, like Scobleizer is for FriendFeed.
osnap.
They don’t need a PR firm… every move they make gets covered, regardless. Along with every site piggy backing off the Twitter API. Twitter is “so hot right now” (compliments to Zoolander), I don’t see the press mentions slowing down anytime soon.
Surprisingly, it’s not just TC.
Most of CNN, Celebrities and other blogs offer free publicity.
True, what goes up, must come down, the speed at it which it goes up is just half of what it comes down.
Soon, people are going to get tired of knowing what other people are doing minute by minute as JM says, bowel movements are not just being updated by employees but also by many twitter users.
Status: @techcrunch May 20th, 2009 at 5:56:23 pm PDT – Jason Hendrix … There goes one… it’s still floating. Oh No, no paper. tweetpic/tyolet
(yeah that was with pic :p)
That makes me feel so much better about my twitter apps…:)…there growing very well also… GO TWITTER
thats just awesome, truly awesome
The Oprah Effect (among many other things)
Don’t forget the WSJ, when I reported on this last week (via PaidContent) that was another point of reference.
Well, pick any Website, right. WSJ.com is actually less relevant than NYTimes.com as a comparison because it has much less traffic due to its pay wall (7.5M worldwide in April—comscore).
Wow! Look how steep that increase is. It’s amazing how fast Twitter is growing.
Phenomenal growth story!
NYT on the way out, snorkle.
wtf?
NYT actually seems like one of the only newspapers even attempting to keep up with the new digital climate surrounding print materials. I commend them for it.
http://www.goog...=ytd&sort=0
The current big thing.
….but it still doesn’t have a business model. Enough about Twitter already – even Oprah is back to Skype…
“enjoy it while it lasts because it never does”. Congrats. Next target FB?
Yet they still don’t have a business model.
It is like make a free buffet. The more people coming to eat for free make you lose more money. Yet all Twitter yells is this: “Look, we got 30 Million buffet customers.”
Twitter, like amazon, is centrally focus on their product(s). They realize the return on a well thought out service will be massively greater than a crappy one; even if it takes a few years to turn a profit.
They actually have a brilliant business model for longevity and I wish them the best.
Still don’t care.
I’m 28. Right between Gen X and Gen Y (though I think pretty firmly planted in the latter) and SO MANY of my friends are resisting Twitter. What’s up with that? Twitter’s awesome, easy, useful and free. How many sites can say that? They’ll find a way to monetize eventually, and hopefully they’re taking more money from B2B then from the regular folks of the world.
I’m 28 and one of those people “resisting” twitter. To me it is just a whole site dedicated to updating; a feature I didn’t really care for to begin with. So in short, it is pretty darn easy to resist.
I think that this hits on one of Twitters key issues right now (besides monetization). Branding. You read Techcrunch, so I’m gonna guess you fall into the savvy/early adopter demo… The fact that you think Twitter is just for Facebook-esque status updates shows how far Twitter has to go. I blame Twitter, as they’re current messaging still points to the whole point of twitter being: answering the question “what are you going right now?”. The application has evolved into so much more than that, and there’s no excuse (especially with the amount of press they get) for there still to be confusion in the marketplace…
Resisting or just don’t care?
Amazing how spam grows, ah? the secret of Twitter – it’s one way… you get to share with 500 people your wisdom, but only few read, and on and on, how cool is the web, la di da… you always hated those corporate guys who CC 100 people on their mails, guess what? now there are 50,000,000 of them and counting… brrrrr
digg is dead baby, those numbers are bs
I remember hearing that TechCrunch (or Arrington) is an investor in Seesmic (hope I’m right). I’m interested in knowing if TechCrunch invested in Twitter also. If they are, then as a reader a disclosure would be appreciated.
Anyhow, fantastic post! Twitter is an amazing website and really fuels the vehicle for the real time web 2.0!
no investment in Twitter, either by Mike or me personally or by TechCrunch. they don’t even advertise with us
does twitter even advertise?
You need to make money to advertise.
How in the world does DIGG have an audience anymore. Please add DIGG to the deadpool!
What are you talking about? Please explain…
“How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueek, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009.”
And that was approximately 2354 TC posts about Twitter ago.
dude, you forgot this one. Get your numbers straight!
look at that growth chart. I don’t believe any internet service has done that before. It’s not a hockey stick, it’s a rocket launch.
Regardless of the bogusness of Comscore’s measurement methods, Twitter’s growth is off the charts and has really just begun.
Anything this easy and universal is sure to continue to grow. Hipsters can tire of it and move on to new things, but the global market is there waiting for them, and the search angle is where some serious money lives.
I don’t get it why do you guys post news with comscore data? That data is not accurate and not relevant at all.
I know you are looking for some cheap news but this is ridiculous.
impressive.
Loic- Do you know the user “market share” and/or uniques of Twitter clients versus Twitter.com?
Jeff
Don’t forget: grats to their dev team! Wow!
LOL, no, their dev team sucks…fail whale anyone?
Does anyone know the # of monthly uniques who use Twitter via desktop or mobile clients (e.g. TweetDeck)? Or the market share???? Thanks!
Well, interesting to see how it will all pan out.
For arguments sake lets assume that twitter launches a search engine along with twitter feeds that is separate. Maybe they team up with Yahoo and MSN, Wolfram or Apple who knows.
Google is still King, and FB is soon to be yesterdays fad. So what exactly will Twitter boy needs to do in order to really max out on this sudden interest in his service/company?
Hmm. How about a social network section like FB, plus the regular Twitter and also a search engine deal like a Google or some combination?
Would that dilute Twitter’s brand? Just a thought.
Twibeo is a site that allows thousands of people to say what they are doing by sharing text, photos and even videos.
Check out the multimedia Twitter,
http://www.twibeo.com
I am getting so tired of seeing this comment pasted into every Twitter-related post here…
I agree. Lame. We don’t care.
Haha!
Glad to see that the recent Nielsen study about Twitter was indeed questionable:
http://www.smar...hin-four-weeks/
Twitter will surpass facebook in membership by the middle of 2010. The problem I see is that Twitter is virtually useless as soon as you follow more than 30 people. After that, I get better conversations sitting on a bus.
I’d bet you $100 that won’t happen.
Facebook will be surpassed in users actively using the service, but may not for accounts since very few people will deactivate their facebook account to move to twitter.
I can’t see twitter sustaining this type of growth for a year or more. The question is, does it level off or is it a bell curve (a la friendster, aol, myspace, etc).
Oh, and more than 100 million people login to facebook every day, and they have over 225 million users. As impressive as twitter is, let’s keep those numbers in mind/perspective.
http://www.face....php?statistics
we’re all Jealous
This is a great accomplishment for Twitter. Even thought a lot of people still don’t get the value of the service it’s great to see them doing well.
Who cares about sites like Twitter and FB when they don’t have a business model. They are all fads. Any moron can get VC funding and offer a product for free if they don’t care about revenue.
The truth of the matter is both FB and Twitter are fucked since neither have a way of generating revenue…sure they say they aren’t focusing on revenue, the truth is they themselves don’t have a model.
America would never learn from its mistakes. What’s the point spending VC money in building these cash burning twitter, FB kind of sites with no revenue model or clearcut way of monetizing.
All the taxpayer’s money is getting drained in so called internet startups (fads). It’s 20-80 principle, while 20% of america works hard and makes money, the silicon valley startups burn cash on the name of innovation.
It’s high time Obama administration regulates VC/PE industry as well
Twitter is useless i just want to know if techcrunch has any other articles because no one cares about twitter. Twitter is for insecuree teenagers please. I wonder how much TC isinvested with the company since every other article is about them
100m by Xmas and 1 billion 2012
Well, duh.
100m by Xmas and 1 billion by close of 2012 …bring it on twitter you’ve awoken Google, Facebook, ebay and Microsoft to a real threat at last.
You’re an idiot.
Google is actually trying to buy Twitter because of the search engine it uses. It’s extremely powerful.
He’s not an idiot.
I tend to agree with Larry & Venkat (to a point at least). Whilst it’s obviously interesting watching a site like Twitter rocket in the way that it is, with YouTube & FB burning money supporting traffic they can’t monetise, if I were at Twitter I’d actually want to see that traffic start levelling off pretty quickly.
Meet “SuckaFool”
The new twitter superstar…
http://twitter.com/SuckaFool
OMG that is marvellous
Well done Twitter. Truly amazing experience. Yesterday I post something on Twitter.
http://khalilal...-learn-embrace/
Twitter’s real time search is a joke. Some applications that are created for twitter will be good, but won’t be able to generate enough revenue for twitter.
That being said Twitter will sooner or later turn to selling advertising spots on their site as their main source of revenue.
I completely disagree. Twitter is doing it right -> http://www.cssk...ial-networking/
I think Twitter developers who are taking full advantage of the free service api are going to make WAY more money than twitter itself.
You could easily build ontop of mobile services – say, Nextel for instance. Much of their subscribers are construction industry. We have tools to monitor workers, communicate information. Etc. Information communication is key in business. And Twitter is proving a huge ‘micro communication’ platform for FREE. As long as this company keeps getting stupid free money, they will continue to broadcast API’s that developers can make tons of cash with.
Twitter needs to either build some kind of SaaS for specific industries to generate revenue, or developers are going to be reaping all the benefits of Twitters backbone.
of coarse they were gonna they get so much press
Twitter use is rising with the unemployment rate.
Umm… hey!
I’m not surprised Twitter is growing so quickly. Everywhere you turn, TV, Radio, News, everyone talks about Twitter. With the steam it’s growing at, and the different types of people involved, I think Twitter is going to grow past some of the largest sites we have today.
No it’s not. I turn on my TV, radio, news, and nobody talks about it.
That toilet paper app is relly doing wonders! I ate a ham sandwich today.