An anonymous source claims Twitter has just 200,000 "total active users" per week, according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Or, about the population of Shreveport, Louisiana. That compares with 100,000 active weekly users in January, and 50,000 last April.
Impressive math, isn't it? Kind of like the old Breck shampoo commercials. If you get two friends to start using it, and then they each get two more friends on board, and so on, and so on, and so on, pretty soon the entire country will be happily using it!
Unfortunately for Twitter and its deep-pocketed investors, there are a few problems with this scenario. First, this is a rumor. Second, exponential growth projections -- especially those associated with Internet startups -- have a way of leveling off. Just ask the folks at Linden Lab, whose Second Life service has faltered in terms of growth in hours spent in-world and peak concurrency.
There is also a problem with definitions: What does "active users" mean? And why does Arrington's source claim there are more than one million "total users," while another user claims more than six million Twitter sign-ups?
Whatever the truth is, it's still very apparent that Twitter has a long way to go before it achieves mainstream penetration. Even if that happens, it's not clear how the service will generate serious revenue. Until these issues are addressed, the sky-high valuations of Twitter should be treated with extreme skepticism.
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Comments
It would indeed be nice to have some solid user information on Twitter.
I want to contradict Twitter would have difficulties to find a business model. On the contrary, I've already argued that
Twitter can develop an ad supported business model.
http://www.floort.com/show.php?fid=1066
Pieter Jansegers
http://microblogs.ning.com
Advertising seems like a long shot to me. What do you think the CTRs and CPMs would be for Twitter-borne ads? Surely not that much. How many billions of page views would be required to make the service profitable? How would they work on mobile devices, where a lot of Twittering takes place?
Twitter's mainstream penetration has been and is very slow. At least 90% of the people I ask, of whom most are in Media, one way or another, have not heard of, or have vaguely heard of Twitter.
Is there a legitimate use for Twitter in, say a small sales office with five staff running around all the time, trying to stay in touch with each other, and the maintenance for an apartment building?
Could Twitter be an advantage over - walkie-talkie, IM, cell phones? And could this in turn allow Twitter (or competing service) to grow?
Mark
http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky
While the questions about differing statistics are valid, anyone familiar with Twitter (or any other web service) should be able to account for the discrepancies. People sign up for something and then never use it. In the case of Twitter, there are also the people who sign up, add their blog feed and then never engage any deeper than that (i.e. manually post to Twitter or read other Tweets). . Then there are others who use it all the time, like an on-going conversation on life.
I do think that Twitter quickly needs to monetize to even hope to stay afloat. I was skeptical about using it in the first place, and am not nearly as addicted as others, but it's a good way to stay connected with peers (especially those of us who don't work out of an office) and friends on an informal basis.
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