
50% of Tweets Consumed Are Generated By Just 20K Elite Users - profitbaron
http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3386
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jgilliam
Last I heard, Twitter has 200 million users. So that means the top 0.01% of
users get 50% of all tweet impressions. Tweet wealth is 100x more concentrated
than financial wealth in America.

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d2
I'm curious what the graph of active users looks like.

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patio11
It will look like a zipf distribution. ("Long tail")

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grsites
This is not terribly surprising, and illustrates why Facebook and Twitter are
completely different (and complementary) social networks.

Facebook for keeping tabs on people you know and _who know you_ , i.e.
symmetrical relationships.

Twitter turned out to be well suited for keeping track of people you know, but
who have no idea who _you_ are, because _they_ are well-known, not you, i.e.
asymetrical relationships.

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markkat
This was my thought as well. And thus, I think it's hard to see how they are
in competition with each other, aside from competing for users' attention in
general.

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mitchellh
Interesting, but not surprising. I believe this is pretty standard human
behavior. If you are creating something of value (or perceived value), the
"elite" (top X%) will own a large chunk of this value.

This statistic can probably be spun around: I'm sure the 20K elite users have
a large % of the total followers of every twitter user.

Similar, tangentially related: About 43% of the financial wealth of America is
owned by the top 1% of American households[1].

[1]: <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html>

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mixmax
Financial wealth is know to follow a powerlaw distribution, this is probably
the same.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>

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lkozma
Or maybe not:

<http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html>

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grandalf
Please, someone create 20 accounts and follow these users and publish a free
50% firehose.

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ryanhuff
Why bother creating the accounts when you could just use RSS. Polling every
minute should be sufficient.

<http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/259379883.rss>

Winning.

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djb_hackernews
Twitter won't allow that.

You could use the api

<http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api>

but then twitter would come after you if you tried to syndicate the content.

So then you have to deal with Gnip... and thats 10 cents/1000 tweets.

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panacea
Consumed? That implies that they're actually read (and comprehended rather
than downloaded to a stream?), and that they no longer exist afterwards.

Sure, the firehose favors subscriptions, but that's about the only take-away.

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lowprofile
I always wonder about zombie consumers, those that are signed up to follow but
never really pay attention to the tweets.

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scottchin
Interesting. Was this paper actually published somewhere? I didn't see any
listing of a conference name. Am curious what kind of academic conferences for
which this paper would be suitable. Would like to check those proceedings out.

And as an aside, I had no idea that Yahoo had a research division.

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evangineer
Yahoo Research haven't come up on my radar before either, whereas I've seen
reams of material from Microsoft Research and Google.

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ajays
Here's their Publications page: <http://research.yahoo.com/publication>

Yahoo Research people regularly win "Best Paper" awards in web-related
conferences. For example, from this page:
<http://research.yahoo.com/node/3443> "For the third year in a row, Yahoo!
Labs took the Best Paper Award at WSDM 2011"

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donnyg107
Great example of a company which established a strong user base and a
comfortable format to ease in new users. I don't think this article is
indicative of twitter's over-rated status in popular culture, I see it as good
establishment within popular culture and 20,000 people who love and drive a
company. From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and
winning company.

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drivingmenuts
> From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and winning
> company

Well, except for the bit about having an actual business plan that makes money
from something other than soaking investors.

But they'll have that any day now!

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hammock
This is pretty much what I expected- Pareto distribution of tweets is only
natural.

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VladRussian
>roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where
the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most
followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities
listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however,
bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories.

nice portrait of the human race.

