Are These Facts And Figures About Twitter True Or False?

In a recent post I mentioned that Quantcast’s traffic estimate for Twitter for the USA was 26.5 Million visitors for the month of June, 2009. As I don’t live in the USA, but Sydney, Australia, I am kind of curious about the number of people visiting Twitter from other countries including Australia, as it has implications for the reach, usage and the influence of Twitter around the world.

Trying to obtain figures about Twitter’s traffic worldwide is difficult at best, for some strange reason there seems to be a black hole about this data. So here is my best estimate (at 11 pm on a Monday night).

So using the 26.5 Million in the USA as a basis for extrapolating the figures for the rest of the world, how do we obtain a good estimate. Well here goes.

If you have a look at traffic of different posts for each link from Bit.ly you can actually get a good approximation of the average percentage for each country that visits the link (they actually break each links traffic by country against the total) and the averages are actually quite consistent across a range of posts links measured by Bit.ly. ( I actually took the time to do this.. I don’t have a life! )

Here are the Countries averages and the ranks and numbers of visitors I estimate are visiting Twitter each month by country.

Note: The basis for this is that an average  of 65% of all Twitter visitors to links are from The USA, spread across a reasonable number of posts links as measured by Bit.ly. So this means that if there are 26.5 Million Vistors from the USA , then the total traffic (100%) is 40.77 Million. You still with me? Alright lets use the approximate average percentage of traffic per link for each country that I obtained by looking at a number of clicks on links  in Bit.ly( By the way I am only looking at the Top 10 Countries)     

Country      Rank       Average Percentage         Numbers of Monthly Visitors

USA                   1                       65%                                           26,500,000

Canada             2                        8%                                                3,260,000

UK                      3                        6%                                                2,245,000

Australia         4                        2%                                                   815,000 

Germany         5                        2%                                                   815,000

France             6                         1%                                                   408,000

Brazil               7                         1%                                                    408,000

Israel               8                         1%                                                    408,000

India                9                         1%                                                    408,000 

Japan             10                        1%                                                    408,000

Note: These are approximate figures that I put together for a bit of fun.

So are these numbers true or false. Would like to hear if you have some more accurate facts and figures on the great Twitter Mystery?