Twitter Traffic Explosion: Who’s behind it all?
Written by Max Freiert (contact - e-mail) -- May 15th, 2008 | Recommend ThisTwitter has made headlines for some amazingly powerful stuff lately; breaking the news of recent China’s earthquake; partnering with MySpace for it’s “data availability” project; even helping a student get out of jail! All of these speak to the growing popularity of Twitter, and also help to explain it’s recent scaling issues. But how big is twitter, who uses it and how?
Growth a tween would be proud of.
In the past few months, Twitter has grown rapidly. In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month. Looking at Twitter’s Attention share helps to further illustrate how fast the service has grown.
The chart above shows Twitter’s share of daily attention for the past 180 days, and reveals some interesting patterns.
- In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
- Twitter is a weekday event – While its difficult to tell in the chart above, the valleys in the chart below coincide with the weekend, while the peaks represent weekdays. On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
- The weekday skewed tweet activity makes sense in the context of Lee Odden’s Twitter usage poll - which highlighted twitter users affinity for networking and sharing content through twitter.
Its fun to hang with the Y.M.T.A
Who are these 1.2 million visitors, and how intensely do they use the site? We segmented visitors by intensity of use, gender and age for the month of April to get a better idea. Generally, users skew young, male, and addicted to twitter.
The data above shows that nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month), and another 25% are light users (2-5 visits/month). It should be noted that the somewhat lenient definition of a “heavy” user was a result of the many ways user can connect to Twitter.
The gender and age breakdowns indicate that users skew young and male. These two charts are indexed to the U.S internet average, where “100” is the average.
- Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average internet user. This skew is nearly identical across all three Usage groups.
- Twitter skews heavily towards the college/twenty-something crowd. Twitter attracts 18-24 year-olds at nearly twice the rate of an average U.S website.
- Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.
Twitter may be growing like crazy but it’s yet to go mainstream. Interestingly, Twitter’s strategy of letting developers re-purpose its data may help the service reach the tipping point by making Twitter’s value more accessible. Check back next week to see how these twitter based sites (like twitterlocal and summize) are building a loyal base.
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May 15th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Great post, we did some analysis with RWW last week on some of the usage patters of twitter (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/summize_twitter_trends.php). Lets partner up and do a joint study.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
It is great marketing news that twitter is a weekday event whereas a site like ebay is a weekender special. This says a lot about twitter’s users and using patterns. Well worth a study. I can’t see anything cool about it, but any site with that much attention is cool to look into.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
I’m not sure my 200 following reflects those demographics.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
This is great for Twitter! We ourselves noticed an increase in prominent bloggers writing about the benefits/uses of Twitter so we are assuming just like any “fad”, this site simply grew due to the social networking/wide communication of people online through blogs. Twitter is a great tool and will continue to grow we think!
May 16th, 2008 at 4:56 am
You might want to add ‘mobility’ to the equation. I dunno much about Twitter, but seems like people on the move use it a lot.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Ha according to those demographs i’m a rare thing on twitter. :) Which according to my followers demographs is not so. Or is it different in different area’s across the world, thought these were worldwide figures?
May 16th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Interesting spike in 55-64 age group.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I suspect that if Twitter released statistics about the traffic that their web servers were seeing, the graphs of traffic growth would look even more dramatic.
As an example, the traffic growth above won’t be taking into account non-Twitter web site based traffic, will it? So all the users that are using Twitter from their blog via the API, a desktop client or a mobile won’t factor into that growth.
May 19th, 2008 at 2:34 am
The Twitter Traffic Explosion Report Reveals that twitter will soon be mainstream and that the users who use twitter the most are between the ages of 18-24 while those who visit a single time still make up the majority.
This is a very timely post as social traffic trends are continuing to show that while “tweens” are still making up the largest segment of visitors, more mature visitors are weighing in with increased web site traffic in greater measure than ever before.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Twitdir reports that there are currently a little bit over 1.6 million Twitter users (worldwide) - only Twitter users with a public profile. In your analysis you found that 1.2 million people are using Twitter each month. Are these 1.2 million people only traffic from the US or is it worldwide traffic ?
May 20th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
interesting perspective. but do these track people who use twitter through third party apps without ever going to the site? i rarely go to the site..
May 21st, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Interesting in Abdur’s point above regarding the joint study.
May 28th, 2008 at 6:21 am
What’s twitter? It sound like a program for twits.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Twitter ist ein super Service. Ich nutze Twitter schon einige Zeit und freu mich über die vielen Menschen, die hier auch aktiv sind. Über Titter kann man rund um die Welt Nachrichten austauschen und auch neue Freunde finden.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
The internet continues to watch traffic grow. Consumers use the internet for business and personal.
My free accounting advice site over at http://www.taxhelp-expert.com
continues to receive traffic and I need to track it better.
Thanks for the info.
June 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Twitter is great and I’am very happy with there services so far for our website.