Hard data on twitter usage has been mostly limited to rough estimates provided by third parties. At twitter’s first developer’s conference, chirp, we got some data straight from the source. The first piece of data is that 75% percent of twitter’s traffic is coming from the third party clients and services using the twitter API. This is traffic which won’t usually be collected by those famous measurement services.
Twitter says they have 105,779,710 registered users. This actually doesn’t mean too much as we don’t know how active these users might be. Many people will create an account only to abandon it later. Update 1/2011: now 175,000,000 (from twitter.com site)
In his presentation, the source of these slides, Twitter’s Biz Stone partly answered this question by putting the emphasis on the number of unique visitors per month to twitter’s website. As noted above, this number only reflects about 25% of twitter usage.
User accounts are added at the rate of 300,000 a day. Net growth may change if twitter starts pruning dormant accounts. Update 1/2011: now 370,000 (from twitter.com site)
Of the new accounts, 60% come from outside the US.
User account growth helps drive annual growth, currently at 1,500% a year.
At Chirp, Ev Williams added additional stats. On a daily basis, 55,000,000 tweets pass through twitter, a number which is growing too. Update 1/2011: now 95,000,000 (from twitter.com site)
As a search engine Twitter gives Google a run for its money. 600,000,000 searches are performed daily, using both the twitter browser interface and clients like Tweetdeck.
On a side note, I’ve noticed that historical results from twitter’s own search engine, search.twitter.com, don’t seem to work any more – it appears they’re only interested in recency. In some of the developer presentations, we also learned that twitter handles 3,000,000,000 API requests a day.
We also learned that mobile accounts for a significant amount of twitter activity, not too much a surprise.
In addition to Google Analytics, Twitter has an internal statistics system called bird brain. Some metrics will be publicly available in the future – something advertisers will be demanding for sure. To summarize:
| Statistic | Value |
|---|---|
| API requests, daily | 3,000,000,000 |
| Growth, annual | 1500% |
| Searches, web and API, daily | 600,000,000 |
| Traffic, website | 25% of total |
| Tweets, per day | 55,000,000 |
| Usage, mobile | 37% |
| Users, new registrations per day | 300,000 |
| Users, new registrations from outside USA | 60% |
| Users, registered | 105,779,710 |
| Visitors, unique per month, website | 180,000,000 |
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
Very nice!
Great work! If it’s alright, I’d like to use a couple of the images on my blog – will source the info back to this page.
Thanks so much!