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You might say Twitter is "in the money." As WebProNews previously reported, Twitter has been raising funds at a $1 billion valuation. Twitter CEO Evan Williams wrote on the Twitter Blog today:
There’s a lot of talk today about our financing. Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we’re excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley.
It was important to us that we find investment partners who share our vision for building a company of enduring value. Twitter’s journey has just begun and we are committed to building the best product, technology, and company possible. I’m proud of the team we’ve built so far and I’m confident in the future we’ll build together.
Internet research firm Hitwise Intelligence has taken a look at Twitter traffic, to see if the visitors match the hype.
While the graph above doesn’t count Twitter use via mobile devices and third-party app (which certainly account for a lot of Twitter’s use), Hitwise notes that visits to Twitter.com should still show some correlation to new use adoption.
Hitwise also tracked the number of searches on Twitter (below). Both visits and searches at Twitter.com hit what Hitwise refers to as a "resistance point" in April.
Finally, Hitwise looks at reports for Twitter’s top traffic sources, comparing April to last week. The charts reveal a significant drop between the two.
It’s hard to really put Twitter use into perspective without some kind of stats that reflect mobile and third-party app use. The slowing traffic growth is interesting though. It’s hard to believe that it is occurring, considering that you can’t turn on the television or radio without hearing about some new celebrity discovering Twitter. Perhaps Pee Wee Herman will inject some good traffic for this month’s numbers.
This post have especially stood out to me purely because I have also noticed this about twitter that traffic is slowing as money increases, very good point that you have made as many wont have noticed that
I tend to think Twitter is falling behind Facebook as it is no as popular with woman and non-business owners. They should use their new funds to add features to monetize the site.
Great post and interesting data, I just shared this information and link to your post on my SEO blog at the following link:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/09/27/twitter-picking-up/
I think these numbers are interesting, but without an idea of the mobile and third-party application traffic it’s difficult to say that the actual usage is slowing that much. Third-party apps are a huge part of Twitter.
Just try looking at the results for one of the top trending topics on http://search.twitter.com and look at the percentage of results that have a source other than “less than 20 seconds ago from web“. Just a quick visual on that shows around 50% are coming from sources other than the website.
These numbers may reflect more of an increase in the effectiveness of third-party applications rather than a decline in Twitter itself.