Twitter's Growth Still Accelerating

I recently wrote an article about whether “Twitter Was Fading” and it seems that despite some of the recent negative press, Twitter’s traffic is still pumping. Twitter’s growth from March 2008 to March 2009 was over 1300%, but since then  some of the facts and figures on Twitter’s upward trajectory have been patchy. With no official numbers from Twitter and other reports from comScore indicating that Twitter was stalling, some doubts had crept into the market about the real situation.

The issue primarily has been that a lot of the traffic stats have not been showing real numbers from the third party apps that are generating significant traffic external to the core Twitter calculations.

Pingdom has released some traffic numbers that show the real picture, which includes all traffic from within the Twitter domain as well as the third party Twitter channels.

So if we look at pingdom.com’s Tweets per month graph indicating Twitters real growth, then the observations reveal the following:

• December 2009 was the first month Twitter processed more than one billion tweets (with 1.036 billion tweets).
• January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009.
• The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009.
• January 2010 saw more tweets per day (39.5 million) than the whole of September 2008.

In fact, if you look at the traffic in January this year compared to March, 2009 Twitter’s growth in 10 months has been well over 1,200% according to pingdom.

Note: This research is about Twitter usage, not the number of users, which we have no definite data for. However, it makes sense that with increased activity, the number of users should be increasing as well.

According to worldwide comScore figures which became available recently, Twitter’s own site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from December, 2009 (when it had 65.2 million visitors). Its annual growth rate is still a phenomenal 1,105 percent..(this appears to closely match the numbers from pingdom).

A year ago, Twitter.com attracted only an estimated 6 million visitors.”

So is Twitter growing?  It appears it is well and truly still kicking.