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As IPO Nears, Do Twitter's Active User Claims Add Up?
netbuzz writes "With Twitter's IPO looming, an independent developer who is intimately familiar with the makeup and behavior of the site's users says his analysis of 1 million random accounts does not support the company's claims of 215 million active monthly users and 100 million active daily users. In fact, Si Dawson, who until March ran Twit Cleaner, a popular app used to weed deadwood and spammers from Twitter accounts, puts those numbers at 112 million and 48 million, respectively, or about half of what Twitter claims."
Twitter doesn't make any money and it's not clear how they would. But again, none of that matters. It's buzz it's bubble it's sizzle it's cool. Money will 'develop' on it's own. And if not - Microsoft will buy them and kill it.
I read the email summaries of the people I follow sent to me by twitter. I probably haven't logged in or tweeted anything in over a year.
My brief encounters with twitter suggest that the population is 8% talkative narcissists, 12% adoring fans, 30% spambots, 50% people who thought they were signing up for something else and have since abandoned their accounts.
Is there any way to short a stock that isn't on the market yet?
Is Twitter engaging in "changes for the sake of changes" which are beginning to drive users away?
Ebay is doing it.
Facebook is doing it. /. is probably doing it, as well.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Users? Profits? Bah!
As everybody knows the important question to ask about tech companies is... how much are stupid investors willing to pay for it...?
I don't respond to AC's.
I imagine the SEC would care if they are falsifying data.
No clue... the only person I know that uses twitter is my brother and he only tweets about silly things his wife does because he knows it annoys her. Oops, she tripped up the stairs. Oops, she put her shirt on wrong side out. Oops, she dropped her lipstick and it went in the toilet.
A scorched earth policy of leaving no account standing would be better than actually sifting for usage. :)
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
SEC, investors, and the judge in the trial that's going to happen if they did commit fraud.
I imagine the SEC would care if they are falsifying data.
Hardly "falsifying", the numbers are the same order of magnitude and almost certainly justifiable using some more optimistic assumptions. Nobody's going to prison for this.
It should take us about a week (with plenty of time for beer and food) for a few engineers to bang out a nice RFC for Twitter, with all the loose ends taken care of. Even that is overkill. Microblogging with a feed you can follow is a feature at best. That they were able to build a whole company around it is a testament to folly.
Second, and more important, you need to accept Twitter's contention that 40% of its active users never Tweet (either literally or not within the past month).
Si Dawson can't see the people who just use Twitter as an RSS feed. These people are likely Twitters most active users. People who check their phone everyday to see what so and so is doing.
over 85% of statistics are made up? :)
Seriously tho.. popular tech.. incoming IPO.. someone is surprised that a company padded numbers?
Question Reality, Find Your Own Truth...
There is a twitter account that I have wanted for a long time. I rounded up a bunch of friends to report it for spam as its only posting from a long time ago is a "Make money fast" posting. But nope, they haven't done a thing about it. I suspect that it is a "live" account. My guess is that if they were to go through and kill all the dead accounts they would be facing incorrect headlines such as "Users abandoning Twitter, 10% lost in this month alone."
Do they need to be actual real people?
Yeah?
Well then no. Twitter is a just another ad platform full of shills. Sorry.
Twitter users are not a statistic or a phenomenon to be measured by Twitter itself.
Twitter easily knows exactly how many active users it has.
And considering that the magnitude is enough to half evaluations of its potential income/the value of the company itself, I would call that significant.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Well I would never!
Twitter prohibits spam filters. You're not allowed to write a Twitter client with a spam filter. If you do, Twitter will invalidate your OAuth code. So people actually see Twitter spam. That makes Twitter a spam magnet.
Of course they have huge numbers of fake users. Want to create some fake Twitter accounts? Just get Twitter Account Creator Bot: "... automatically creates thousands of accounts per day without any human intervention ... " Now only $225. Also available: Twitter Follower Bot ("can follow thousands of profiles using keywords"), "Twitter IDs Grabber Bot", and "Twitter Tweets Replier Bot".
If you don't want to do it yourself, you can just buy Twitter accounts in bulk. 20,000 Twitter accounts for $400. That seems to be the going rate; BuyAccs.com also quotes $400 for 20,000 accounts (with avatar!). Google+ and Facebook accounts cost about 5x as much from the same suppliers. When you see low, low pricing for bulk social network accounts, you can be sure the service isn't trying very hard to stop spammers.
There's no problem finding social network spamming services. They advertise openly. Just search Google for "bulk twitter accounts". You don't have to go on Black Hat World, build up a reputation, and get into the closed forums. You don't have to get "bulletproof servers" in some third world country. The social spammers aren't hiding.
(Ad: we could stop this by using SiteTruth to find spam links in tweets. I prototyped a Twitter client with spam filtering and tested it. But Twitter doesn't allow that. "Sponsored tweets" have to get through, you know.)
oversimplified we can just say that twitter is being rosy because they should and twit cleaner is being not-so-rosy because they should. Let us then just average the claims and call that closest to the truth since both entities are skewing towards their favor.
And the result:
163.5 million active monthly
74 million monthly
I read stuff at twitter almost everyday and I don't even have a personal account.
Twitter is more of a broadcast medium than a social network anyway. Most of the most popular accounts are run by celebrities or "stars" in their fields. It seems likely that the number of active users will shrink while those that are active will become more relevant and drive more traffic to the inevitable ads that they will eventually have to add to the site once investors start to ask for profits.
I imagine the SEC would care if they are falsifying data.
You have a remarkable imagination then. My imagination has a mathematician standing in a room in the SEC's Washington headquarters with an analysis that proves Twitters claims violate the very Laws of Thermodynamics, and nobody is interested. The meeting ends and they resume browsing porn back in their offices.
Of course, since my scenario is based on mere history, instead of your immense imaginative powers, I'll defer to you and take it as a given that the SEC has this well in hand.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
There are four types of twitter users.
1. MSM outlets - they tweet links to their stories vids etc
2. Active bloggers/users - we retweet stuff and tweet stuff - depends on when we have time
3. Passive users - they read stuff but rarely tweet anything.
4. Passive non-users - the read tweets but have no account.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I use Twitter to store things I want to remember but don't mind losing. When I see a sponsored twit, I comment inappropriately with their hashtags then delete the sponsored twit.
I don't think I'm using it right. Also, my followers are definitely not using it right. They may have serious mental issues.
No prison, but if you buy some IPO shares you can join the class action lawsuit if the stock price ever drops.
Just like how Google attracts a bunch of eyes and then feeds them advertisements, Twitter does the same thing. I'm surprised Twitter doesn't do more sponsored links than it does. I rarely even see one, but they could probably get away with three constantly.
God spoke to me
Yeah, everyone I know only uses Twitter for broadcasting messages to their close friends/family. But apparently it also lets you insult direct insult celebrities until they have a meltdown. We've never had that kind of technology before and it shouldn't be undervalued.
I imagine the SEC would care if they are falsifying data.
You're new here, right?
"No clue... the only person I know that uses twitter is my brother and he only tweets about silly things his wife does because he knows it annoys her. Oops, she tripped up the stairs. Oops, she put her shirt on wrong side out. Oops, she dropped her lipstick and it went in the toilet."
Your brother is really brave! Congratulate him on behalf of poor souls like me.
I know many people have things scripted to output to Twitter. Maybe a few of us have robots that read Twitter to try to scrape up some statistics. But does any human being actually read Twitter? Seriously. Twitter readers, step forward and tell us that you really do that, and that it's practical, fun, informative, keeps-you-in-touch, or whatever. Please. Because I don't know a single person who actually reads tweets.
At least to judge by the amount of spam that I have received recently from friends who do have twitter accounts; messages claiming to be from them ''inviting me (personal invitation of course) to join twitter''. None of my friends were aware that this crap was being sent in their name.
I decided some time ago that you must be a twit to need twitter :-)
They say they have 215 million monthly users. To me, a user is a person. An account is one of many identities that a person can set up. I can believe 215 million accounts (spam!), but users?
If they're suggesting that 215 million unique people use Twitter every month and there are about 7.2 billion people on Earth today, they're saying that one in every 34 people in the world sign on to Twitter every month.
According to this (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), about 2.4 billion people have access to the internet in one way or another. So if that's the population from which Twitter users come from (mustn't it?), that would mean that 1 in 12 people with internet access log onto Twitter monthly.
Is that really believable? That (globally) 1 in 12 people with internet access log into Twitter at least once a month?
I use twitter everyday (essentially as a simplified rss reader) and i like it. The user-name i have is not the one i wanted, I have three user-names i use regularly, all were taken. All three of those accounts haven't tweeted anything in years and they've all only tweeted less than 10 times.
These accounts are still regarded as active - despite a policy of removing inactive accounts after a (unspecified) period. There are thee options: 1) these people install the twitter app on their phone, sign in and never open it again (but it runs in the background), 2) these people only use twitter's OAuth functionality to sign into other sites, or 3) twitter just doesn't delete inactive accounts.
Will be when IPOs like this one expose the entire Internet ad market as a gigantic ponzi scheme. SEO too.
Nobody has ever sold jack shit from a web ad. Nobody has ever sold jack shit from being #1 on Google. The whole fucking thing is a scam.
Likely to be true!
I think the issue at hand is actually the fact that while twitter can easily measure the number of users it has, Si Dawson can't.
For the purposes of the companies valuation, the number of "active users" is not the number of users who actually post, it's the number of users who will see revenue generating ads. If someone logs onto twitter every day for an hour but has never posted anything, they're still seeing ads and still generating revenue.
As far as I'm aware there's no possible way for any party external to twitter to determine whether a given user logs in to read content or doesn't, only whether they've posted anything which, while important in that content drives views is not the relevant revenue metric.
It doesn't surprise me at all that about half of twitter users might read content far more often than they post it. I check twitter quite often, but I've only posted about a half a dozen times.
And Facebook stock is doing ok now.
This is the only twitter account I know of: https://twitter.com/GSElevator, and even though I enjoy it immensely, I still cannot fathom the existence of twitter.
even though I enjoy it immensely, I still cannot fathom the existence of twitter.
Your link answers it:
It's like texting for people who don't have any friends to text
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I also imagine this. In reality however, sec coudn't care less. IPO MONIES FOR ALL.
Oh yes The SEC, correct me if I'm wrong but Isn't that the regulator that failed to stop Bernard Madoff after being warned several times? hmm.
Ah, nevermind. I'll just RSS.