

Twitter May Have 500M+ Users But Only 170M Are Active - talhof8
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/twitter-may-have-500m-users-but-only-170m-are-active-75-on-twitters-own-clients/

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AznHisoka
Only 175M of 500M? The people are Techcrunch are so out of touch with reality.
That's more than 20% of users. If 20% of all your users are active, you should
be commended.

~~~
shahidhussain
I agree that's a lot, but we need to bear in mind that active can have a lot
of definitions. From the article:

"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a
three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower
or tweeting"

Three months is a long time for activity - monthly / weekly / daily active
user metrics are more common. Also, it (apparently) isn't counting a _visit_
as activity, just these actions. That just makes this a weird metric to
benchmark against.

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Father
In a lawsuit filed against spam tool providers in april; twitter claimed it
had 140 million active users. 140 million claim is right on page 1.
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/88206156/Twitter-lawsuit-to-
counte...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/88206156/Twitter-lawsuit-to-counter-spam)

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s_henry_paulson
Which also begs the question, how many of those active users are actual
people?

~~~
prezjordan
Semi-related: What's preventing FB from artificially creating users themselves
- to make their network look gigantic. I feel like FB would not be able to
continue the growth it has - which begs the question, if they faked it
internally, would we know? /tinfoil.

~~~
eru
Faking it internally would probably stray too close to fraud for comfort. They
don't want that liability.

Not doing anything against users creating duplicate accounts can be gotten
away with easier: Just blame it on negligence, or incompetence.

~~~
stfu
I for once have at least create five to ten Facebook accounts myself, Each
time I get into a situation where I am forced to use Facebook I create a new
throw away account. As I have a deep distaste for Facebook's approach to
privacy and overall business practice these unavoidable logins occur only
every few month or so. I think creating and abounding accounts might be the
least useful user interaction they can get.

~~~
eru
Unless they are smart enough to detect that those multiple accounts are really
one. Then they can still treat you as one person for their analytics.

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manishsharan
So what qualifies an active user ? I have a twitter account and even though I
have never tweeted (yet) I do follow a bunch of people and regularly read up
on what they have to say. I am sure there are several more like me.

~~~
sp332
From the article:

"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a
three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower
or tweeting".

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lukeholder
its a funny world where 170M is seen in a negative light.

~~~
talhof8
170M actives is not that bad at in my opinion, but 170M out of 500+M is quite
strange. And yet, we have to remember twitter is much more suitable for brands
and celebrities than it is for the "normal"-less-known people

~~~
potatolicious
170M out of 500M seems pretty normal for me, in fact, better than most sites,
hip social network startup or otherwise. In most online communities I'd expect
the active/inactive ratio to be _worse_.

------
jere
Twitter seems great for celebrities. Not being a celebrity, however, my
experience with twitter has been one of extreme isolation. I'd bet most of my
followers are either bots or marketers. The rest are mostly strangers with
whom I share no common interests.

The result feels like standing on an empty street corner and shouting to one
in particular. There's no interaction and no indication that anyone is reading
anything I post, ever.* At least on HN or reddit, I get near instant feedback
on just about everything I post.

* _I did get a response from Darude one time, which was pretty cool._

~~~
stfu
This is similar to my experience. It probably depends on how many people you
already know and who are willing to interact with you on that basis to give
you a good start. I am still trying to get into this but the problem is that I
often end up falling back into some "broadcasting" mode instead of engaging
into conversations. Depending on your personality and pseudo popularity it is
difficult and takes a lot of time and effort.

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mistercow
That is a very weird use of the word "only".

~~~
jemka
Out of context (just saying 170M), sure. But 170M represents 34% of the
reported population.

Alternative title,

>Twitter May Have A Lot Of Users But Only 34% Are Active [Techcrunch]

I'm assuming you'd approve of the use of "only" in that case?

~~~
mistercow
>I'm assuming you'd approve of the use of "only" in that case?

Absolutely not. A 34% active user rate is _huge_.

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incision
When I finally broke down and signed up with Twitter over a year and a half
ago, my first half dozen handle choices - all based on my fairly unusual given
name were taken by what appeared to be placeholders. (No profile, few is any
tweets/followers/following and nothing recent).

I'm surprised that 34% are active. I'd have guessed at something more like
5-10%.

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ajays
I have 6 accounts, and use just 1, and that too once every 2-3 months.

I'm guessing the active accounts follow a Zipfian distribution; and probably
the most active ones are bots and corporate accounts (managed by teams of
people).

~~~
redorb
For some reason people say RSS is dead but have a love affair with twitter. I
like you use it for consumption and to produce consumable links with tag
lines. For example my <http://www.twitter.com/pdrintel> has 711 followers (a
lot for me)and has only tweeted 488 times a ratio of posts to followers could
show quality -

What I don't understand is how its any different than RSS besides size limit
in content and easiness to sign up to follow someone.

\- I find more useful as a producer of content; than a consumer of content. I
also find it has more parallels to RSS than anyone would want to admit.

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juanramon
There's a lot of people logged out or that doesn't change most of her data...
so I think that this data isn't accurate.

~~~
tmh88j
What do you mean? If they're logged out they're not active. Changing data
(user info?) shouldn't matter because that's not how active users are checked.

~~~
msmithstubbs
The problem is that the analysis can't measure logged out accounts. Instead,
they measure activity. From the article:

    
    
      ...active in this sense means the number of accounts that were 
      modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, 
      subscribing to a new follower or tweeting, says Guyot. 
      “We believe this is close to a monthly login rate,” he tells me. 
    

So they are assuming if you haven't done anything, you aren't logged in. I
rarely tweet and I don't think I've ever changed my avatar. I do follow or
unfollow accounts, but I'm pretty sure I could find a few three months spans
in my account history where I haven't.

I generally check Twitter a couple of times a day from a logged in account,
but based on the above criteria I would be considered 'inactive'.

