At Chirp, Twitter’s first ever developer conference, co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone finally revealed some key statistics about the company.
- 105,779,710 registered users. This is the number everyone was waiting for. Previous guestimates had put Twitter users in the range of 60m. But the revelation that Twitter now has more than 100m users is big news for a company founded just three years ago. Sceptics who doubted that Twitter was catching on can put those fears to rest. Twitter did not, however, disclose the number of active users it has. That number is likely much smaller.
- 300,000 new users per day. That works out to about 10m new users a month, which could put Twitter on pace to double in size this year. It’s not quite as fast as Facebook is growing, but Twitter has escaped earth orbit.
- 180,000,000 unique visitors to Twitter.com. This is an interesting statistic because it demonstrates that even beyond those power users who are so engaged with the service, the rest of the world is listening too. These extra eyes are people who are coming to Twitter to search the stream and see what people are saying about everything from earthquakes to cupcakes.
- 60 per cent of new accounts are outside the US. Twitter has already proven a powerful communications tool in Iran and Haiti, but it’s clear that the rest of the world is tuning in to Twitter as well. Again, that’s not quite as international as Facebook, but it’s a good metric for a company that wants to be the “pulse of the planet”.
- 75 per cent of traffic is not on Twitter.com.The developers in the audience were happy to hear this. It means that clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck remain indispensable to Twitter, and that the company will therefore be in no hurry to squash them. It also highlights the strength of the ecosystem.
- 100,000 registered apps. About that ecosystem. It’s big. Thousands and thousands of apps are being built that integrate Twitter, sit on top of Twitter, and help businesses use Twitter. Very, very few of these will grow up to be profitable companies on their own. But some will, and the 1,000 or so developers here hope theirs will be among the few that break through.
- 19,000,000,000 searches per month. Yes, that’s billions. Twitter is fielding a huge number of requests for its data. 19bn searches is more than Yahoo and Bing combined, and puts Twitter second only to Google. But there are a few catches. Many of those requests are happening through API calls via third party apps, and that’s a self reported number, as opposed to a figure from the likes of comScore. Danny Sullivan has a good round up of the details on this one.
With Twitter big and getting bigger, Chirp will probably be an annual event. Don’t be surprised if next year, there are more big numbers to report.
