Twitter Traffic

Who's to believe when people report on traffic to Twitter? Compete.com says it's 21.2M unique visitors; comScore says it's 22.3M; Twitter says it's 180M. Given, Twitter does have access to the most accurate data, and they're counting the millions of people who use Twitter by other means (mobile, TweetDeck, off-Twitter Web sites, etc.), but that's a huge spread.

Twitter recently stated that 75% of its traffic comes from third-party apps like Tweetie, which, incidentally, Twitter just bought. While I'm not sure if that 75% includes traffic from sources like other Web sites -- let's assume that it does -- that should mean that 25% (or 45M visitors) of its traffic comes from Twitter.com. So still, there's a wide spread -- more than double -- between what Twitter says their traffic is and what folks like comScore and Compete.com say their traffic is.

Are these Web site traffic reporting services that inaccurate? Is Twitter reporting visits and not unique visitors? If so, that's called fudging the numbers. Consider, Social Media Graphics recently reported that 79% of Twitter accounts they analyzed are not true Twitter users, as they define it.

Twitter Leveling Off?

Within the piles of confidential documents released to TechCrunch this past summer about Twitter, one particular tidbit caught my eye. They were predicting to have 1 billion users by the end of 2013. This struck me as odd, since only around 1.6 billion people in the world have access to the Internet. Even Google, by far the most trafficked Web site in the world, has a mere 150 million visitors a month (mere?).

Mind you, this could be a lofty prediction from a start-up looking for more money, but let's take a look at the trend. Over this summer, traffic to Twitter has been leveling off. One could chalk this up to fewer audiences during summer months, but that typically only affects the television industry. In fact, online video viewing is actually up this summer.

So I figured I'd get more scientific with this, and plug Twitter's traffic numbers into Excel to run some predictions. When forecasting a trend growth, based on the 12 months ending August 2009, Twitter wouldn't reach 1 billion users until November 2043. And running a simple linear growth forecast, they wouldn't reach a billion until May of 2047.

While I don't think Twitter will go the way of SecondLife, I think its adoption rate will level off at around 75 million next year. Despite how utterly simple it is from a technological point of view, there are still a lot of people who don't "get it."