Figures have not been on short supply at Twitter. The micro-blogging site has always kept us updated on the number of tweets per second, number of registered users, number of new accounts etc.but never about the number of active users it has. However, on Thursday, Twitter informed the world that it has 100 million active users every day.
CEO Dick Costolo told tech reporters in an informal chat that exactly half of the 200 million registered users log in monthly, which is up by 82% since the beginning of the year. Of the 100 million active users, around 40% simply read others’ timeline without tweeting themselves.
Costolo and his company are excited about the active user statistics.“ It’s super healthy,” said the CEO. Twitter expects to add 26 million active users before the end of the year.
Around 55 million users log on to Twitter via their mobile phones or tablets every month. Likewise, Web-based users are also increasing. Costolo says now Twitter.com sees 400 million visitors a month vis-a-vis 250 million at the beginning of the year.”
Twitter plans to make its mobile applications more consistent and spread its most recent advertising campaign–Promoted Tweets–beyond just Twitter.com.
Costolo claimed that the company intended to remain independent and increase its revenue through advertising. “We want to grow the business the way we want to and not be beholden to public markets until we feel like we want to be,” he said.
Twitter seems to have set a lot in store on its advertisement plans. “We now feel that based on the engagement rates we are seeing, that we are ready to expand further,” said costolo suggesting that users could be exposed to ads from companies that they do not follow. “It is our firm belief that our advertising platform is the only revenue component that we need to have in the market in order to be a huge independent business,” he said.
Speaking from the company’s headquarters at San Francisco, Costolo gave a slurry of data – Twitter now hosts roughly a billion tweets every five days, 230 million tweets every day, and has hit a new record for tweets per second: 8,900. That record was set the Sunday before last, when Hurricane Irene hit New York and Beyonce announced her pregnancy on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards.
To demonstrate the growth of the site, in its blog post Twitter mentioned some of the celebrities, politicians and sport stars who use the service. It revealed that 35 global heads of state use Twitter as a primary way to communicate with their constituencies. More than 40% of global religious leaders are on Twitter including the Dalai Lama and the Pope. As far as entertainers are concerned, 87% of Billboard’s Top 100 musicians of 2010 actively engage their fans on Twitter.
In the coming weeks Twitter will be launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and simplified and traditional Chinese and taking the languages supported to 17.
In a totally unrelated development, the Anonymous group of online activists released a new tool, named URGE (Universal Rapid Gamma Emitter) which enables people to hijack trending topics on Twitter and tweet messages with them. However, the group denied that the purpose of the tool is to hijack or exploit. “It was created to make it easier for us to tweet faster without copying and pasting continuously.”
Anonymous members say they are annoyed with all the redundant and ‘pop culture’ topics featured on Twitter trends and want to draw more attention to topics that actually serve a cause.