25
2009
Twittered Out?
On the heels of yesterday’s rumor that Twitter is close to securing an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company’s valuation in the $1 billion range, I decided to take a quick look at Twitter’s market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic.
It should be noted that the above chart indicates visits to Twitter’s website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption.
Another angle on measuring new user adoption is to track the volume of searches on “Twitter.” As we can see in both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.
To explore the hypothesis that slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users, we can turn to our Experian Hitwise Clickstream report that shows new versus returning users from the top Twitter traffic sources. Here’s a table for those traffic sources in April 2009:
You can see the drop-off in new users if we examine the same report as of last week:
Temporary set-back or user-saturation, what are your thoughts?
Twitter Traffic Slows as Money Increases
You might say Twitter is "in the money." As WebProNews previously reported, Twitter has been
If by application data you mean sources such as Tweetdeck and Twhirl then I think the data is too incomplete to test the hypothesis. Those applications are simple and increase the functionality of Twitter several-fold, and I suspect that a lot of new users are coming to Twitter directly through desktop and/or mobile apps.
I’m hopeful that the new round of funding hints that Twitter has a solution to the spam problem that has been shutting down some of its most prominent users, and threatens the usability of the service even for non-celebrity users.
Bill,
This is great, timely data. I came here via a Tweet of yours right after posting an article on my blog that has generated a heap of discussion on this topic (over 2000 page views on Friday). I don’t have access to the data that you do, but I’ve been doing click through analysis for the last few months and I’ve watched the clicks drop off. I found that across many users (Celebrities, power users all the way to Joe Twitterer) click through rate is less than 1% across the board – which indicates that everyone is broadcasting, and no one is listening. I shared the data and my thoughts in the post that I’ve linked to above. I think what we’re seeing is the utility for many people is dropping out as they are realizing that “talking to a deaf crowd” doesn’t bring them the value that they used to get. It “feels” superficial now. No one wants to talk anymore, because they instinctively feel that no one is listening/cares. Thoughts?
Thanks so much for sharing this data. Great stuff. Totally validates what many of us are feeling happening inside the ecosystem.
Facebook vs. Twitter IV.
Hitwise: There is a competitive threat that Twitter (0.14%) may pose to a 6.10% Facebook reach (USA); http://j.mp/40Q0nX…
Bill,
I commented on Alan Long’s recent post titled “Twitter’s Growing Influence” about the volume of traffic to the Twitter API and asked whether you could compare web traffic that analysts commonly report against and all Twitter traffic including the API.
The reason I mention it again is that you might find that the traffic to Twitter isn’t stalling at all, it is just changing medium from the browser to a Twitter client.
If that were the case, depending on how Hitwise measure new/returning visits – that might play a role in why those numbers appear the way they are.
I’d be fascinated to see a comparison if you can provide it.
Al.