A last look at Twitter userbase growth (through June 2009)
A number of people have been asking about updates to the earlier posts on Twitter’s user profile population as well as some statistical analysis. I’m joining the Microsoft Bing search team so I probably won’t be sharing as much data in the future, but I wanted to get a couple of charts out first.
Here’s an updated look at Twitter’s user base growth, through June 2009. This survey has many spam accounts pruned out, so the actual number of user profiles at any point in time is probably higher than the graph plotted here. Up and to the right, heading past 13M is the main takeaway. Also note that the majority of Twitter profiles have been created within the past few months. Compare with the graph through May 2009
Here’s the corresponding estimate of new user accounts per day. That first big spike is the Oprah show featuring Twitter. Not sure exactly which media events go with the more recent spike, likely some combination of Ashton Kutcher vs CNN and other celebrities on a campaign to get more followers. As a reminder, the graphs don’t really drop off at the right edge, that’s just from new users not being discovered immediately.
Unfortunately I probably won’t be putting together any stats visualizations here as I transition the SocialQuant work to Microsoft Bing. But I’m looking forward to help bring some interesting applications for Twitter and other social media on the Bing platform, and hope you’ll be able to enjoy some results there in the near future.
