Twitter's Growth Still Accelerating

Written by Jeff Bullas - View Comments
Categories: twitter


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.



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  • http://gtmometal.blogspot.com/ Jason Saulnier

    Great article thanks

  • alice

    ta luv, needed for a preso tomrow

  • http://jeffbullas.com/2010/04/15/what-is-the-speed-of-social-media/ What Is The Speed Of Social Media? « Jeffbullas's Blog

    [...] Twitter is growing at over 1000% in the last 12 months with a similiar growth in the previous year [...]

  • http://rvsocialmedia.com/2010/04/15/social-media-is-spreading-fast/ Social media is spreading, fast. « Social Media for Dealers

    [...] Twitter is growing at over 1000% in the last 12 months with a similar growth in the previous year [...]

  • http://www.johnakerson.com John Akerson

    I just read an article over at Mark Cuban’s blog about how “facebook is the new Internet” I don’t agree with him, but given the growth, functions, capacities, and future for both Twitter and Facebook, I’d say that Internet 2.0 has eclipsed 1.0. No matter what metric you use, – >1b tweets/month, 1600% growth… it is pretty astounding.

  • http://twitter.com/pauleichberger/status/17208394415 Paul Eichberger

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/davetabler/status/17512837658 Dave Tabler

    C'MON Jeff! This is a 3 month old post. Misleading. RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/reveali/status/17612881616 jwcorcoran

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/trendyrio/status/17613362110 TRENDYRIO

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/joefblaze/status/17704059170 Joe Blaze

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/george_revutsky/status/17704078614 George Yury Revutsky

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/maalicious/status/17709434348 Thirumaal Arumugam

    RT @JoeFBlaze: RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/maureen_tseng/status/18098194677 Maureen_Tseng

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/lachlanmaxwell/status/18098986166 Lachlan Maxwell

    Twitter's growth still accelerating… http://is.gd/dl5HE

  • http://twitter.com/michellekane/status/18290689822 Michelle Kane

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://twitter.com/olleh1958/status/18395167796 구기문

    RT @jeffbullas: Twitter’s Growth Still Accelerating http://bit.ly/dsk2O1

  • http://www.fransgaard.com Robert Fransgaard

    Can’t argue with a number like “1300%”.

    But I’d love to see stats for how many real people it actually equals as many have more than one twitter and some twitter are run by bots.

    I’d also love to see stats on how much is unique content and how much is retweets or auto tweets.

    I’d also like peace on Earth and a holiday home on Mars while I’m at it :-)

  • http://www.loisgellermarketingroup.com Lois Geller

    I like the look of these Twitter stats. I know that my own account has slowed down. I figured that everyone was on vacation…but then other friends on Twitter have told me that it has slowed for them also.

    What is your own personal experience…have your tweetdecks been quiet lately?

  • http://www.arkovi.com Blane Warrene

    The statistics are substantial and the growth is evident from these numbers. I do agree with Robert’s comment of looking at the stats of real accounts versus bots. In our view, and we work to educate our customers and those around us, the key is insuring there is quality in the conversations business is having both as listeners, sharing and creating content.

    Twitter can be a powerful tool used in conjunction with other online (and offline) activities.

  • http://gavinllewellyn.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/2011-beckons/ 2011 beckons! « Gavin's Blog

    [...] really excited to see the growth in social media over the past year. Amongst many other things, Twitter has continued it’s meteoric rise, Facebook registered a whopping 500 million ‘friends’ and the number of blogs being [...]

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