Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets A Day
On the official Twitter blog yesterday, the popular social media micro-blogging site Twitter finally released its own statistics. According to the post by a member of the Twitter analytics team, the site which allows users to post publicly readable status updates of up to 140 characters, is currently logging some 50 million “tweets” per day.
Exponential Growth
The post gives a short breakdown of Twitter stats over the past few years. By 2007, just after the launch of the site, they were receiving 5,000 tweets per day. (Tweets are the term given to the brief updates users post.)
By 2008, users were posting an estimated 300,000 tweets per day, and by the start of 2009, that number had increased to 2.5 million. Over the course of last year, that figure increased by 1,400% to 35 million per day, and now, in the opening months of 2010, they’re logging an astonishing 50 million tweets a day.
The blog post explains that that figure translates to 600 tweets per second.
Excluding Spam
Although Twitter says that they have deliberately excluded those tweets which are considered spam, the number apparently does not include the tweets received by users. This means that they’re reporting only on unique tweets, comments and retweets. Every tweet actually made (or forwarded) by a user.
Tweet deliveries, it explains, are a significantly higher number, as each tweet is delivered to multiple recipients. And of course, tweet searches comprise a separate data set as well.
Growing Popularity
Regardless of the many metrics one could use to measure Twitter activity, it’s a simple fact that 50 million tweets a day is a staggering number. It certainly points to the growing popularity of the service.
Of course, the major drawback still exists…nobody has figured out a way for Twitter to make money off all these tweets yet.