Twitter - dramatic growth in (older) traffic

Twitter.com has been around since [Jan 2000] late 2006 but it seems that it arrived on everyone's radar quite recently.

According to Alexa's Twitter stats, the beginning of 2009 saw a big spike in Reach (the percentage of Internet users that go to Twitter):

Twitter has rapidly climbed from 0.1% of all Internet users up to 1.4%.

There has also been an associated surge in Twitter's Rank (the popularity of the site compared to all other sites - Google currently enjoys #1 rank), but interestingly this surge came in just the last few weeks of March 09, according to this graph. (Why didn't it surge in January when the Reach dramatically shot up?)

That scale on the vertical axis of the above chart is logarithmic. We can see finer details in the growth story when a logarithmic scale is used.

Older Demographic Enjoys Twitter

One of the most interesting aspects of Twitter is the age group that visits it most often.

Twitter is about microblogging — each "post" (or "update" in Twitter-speak) has a maximum length of 140 characters. It would seem that such a service would appeal to the attention-challenged teenage set, but it does not seem so.

The following chart is from Comscore.com, and they got the stats from Reuters, Twitter Older than it Looks.

What is a real surprise here is that the age group that visits Twitter most often is the 45-54 year-olds, followed closely by the 25-34 year-olds. Those below 25 are the least likely to check it out.

All of this makes Twitter a hot property. Amazingly, it doesn't really have a business model. With the traffic that it gets (15 million viewers per month), it won't be long before we see all manner of advertising.

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