End Of Speculation: The Real Twitter Usage Numbers
Speculation about Twitter’s new round of financing is leading everyone to speculate on Twitter’s actual penetration into the “mainstream,” or lack thereof.
Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year, albeit from a minuscule base. Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors. Comscore puts the worldwide number at 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in March.
None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients like Alert Thingy, MySocial24×7 and Twhirl. Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.
The key measure of Twitter usage is total users, total active users and total messages sent. And according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats:
March 2008
Total Users: 1 million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size - In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users - they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.
The company has not blessed these numbers, nor do I expect them to. If they respond to my email request for comment I’ll post an update here.
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GroupTweet Back Online, Promises No More Privacy Slip Ups
GroupTweet is a service that let’s users send private Twitter messages to a group of other users. It’s works great, unless you screw up and accidentally enter your normal Twitter credentials into the site instead of the credentials for a new Twitter account you create for the service.
If you accidentally put in your normal Twitter credentials, the service took all of your private direct messages on Twitter and published them. Twitter user Orli Yakuel and others found this glitch the hard way, and suffered major embarrasement.
After we reported on this on April 23, GroupTweet creator Aaron Forgue shut the service down. Today he relaunched the service with a number of changes that he says will stop this from happening again.
First of all, he disabled all existing accounts. He updated instructions to be more clear. And he also set up the service so that only brand new Twitter accounts can be used - so if you still accidentally put in your normal account, it will detect it and show an error. Finally, the service now only retrieves message for one day.
Assuming all of these new features work properly, GroupTweet is likely safe to use even for the most careless of users.
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Blodget Says Facebook Is Only Worth $9 Billion, Hypothetically Speaking
Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.
Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SIA decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.
The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.
Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)
Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SIA gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.
But what are you gonna do? At least SIA acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.
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How Much Is Twitter Worth?
Yesterday CNET’s Charles Cooper reported that Twitter had signed a term sheet to raise $15 - $20 million in a new round of venture funding
It’s fairly well known that they are out talking to VCs (it’s hard to keep that quiet), but our sources are saying no deal is imminent yet, and that Twitter is still meeting with potential suitors.
The company has received a number of term sheets, according to one source. Valuations range from $60 million on the low end to more than $150 million on the high end. There is, clearly, a bit of salivating going on around Twitter.
One reason for all the attention: growth rates suggest that it is now just a matter of when, not if, Twitter usage will go mainstream. Twitter usage has “exploded” in the last couple of months, says our source (this is supported by Comscore, which shows total page view doubling from 10 to 20 million between February and March, although it is nearly impossible to guess at total Twitter usage since there are no many access points other than the Twitter website, via the API).
The company may not take the highest valuation offered - it limits potential exits and makes hiring harder. But it seems likely that the round will be done at a valuation above $60 million.
Twitter now has 17 or so employees. Their biggest non-payroll expense is supposedly SMS fees, although they have hit a ceiling and no longer pay a marginal fee per message as the company grows.
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Twitturly Cracks The TwitterMeme Nut
People who hang out on Twitter a lot know that quite often big news breaks there first. A recent example - when Chinese hackers took down SportsNetwork, the news was on Twitter well before we covered it.
But so far, unless you’re lucky enough to be following the right people, and online when the news breaks, you aren’t going to necessarily see the breaking news. Services like TwitLinks have launched recently that utterly failed to solve the problem, despite excitement from bloggers.
Today, though, Orli Yakuel pointed me to Twitturly, a service that holds some promise. It aggregates URLs linked in Twitter messages and puts them on the home page based on overall popularity, calculated simply by determining the number of times the URL was in a Twitter message. Like TechMeme, the more people who link to an item the higher it appears. As time goes on, the story deteriorates and drops in the rankings.
The result is a page of very fresh and interesting links that users can go to and see the most popular current URLs being linked to.
Of course what’s beautiful today is spam hell tomorrow. If this gets any traction (and I believe it will), it will have the same problems that Digg saw with people creating multiple accounts and linking to stuff just to bump up the votes. There are ways of dealing with this, such as giving more weight to Twitter accounts with a lot of followers, but it will be a constant battle against the bad guys.
We’ll see how it evolves. But for now, it’s a place to check out what’s interesting right now, according to the Twitter universe.
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You Didn’t Realize It, But You Really Want Those Twitter Messages In Your Calendar
It’s a very simple tool, built by Tijs Vrolix to show off his coding and design skills: Subscribe to messages from any Twitter user in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). Those messages are then automatically added to the calendar, at the appropriate day and time.
Useful? I don’t know. It’s certainly useful to closely monitor/stalk people (or yourself). If you want to add my daily words of wisdom to your calendar, my page is here (which also includes a graph of total twitter usage by day.
Thanks to Robin Wauters for the tip.
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Twitter Reportedly Putting More Gas In The Tank
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter is looking to raise a Series C round.
They’re hearing that the company wants $15M at a $60M valuation, probably from former investors Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures, and perhaps from Spark Capital as well.
Twitter raised over $5M in funding last July. Digital Garage also invested in the company this past January as part of Twitter’s expansion into Japan (the only market where Twitter is actually making money).
The news of this Series C comes on the heels of a couple significant departures.
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Lee Mighdoll Out At Twitter, Business Plan Still MIA
Twitter VP Engineering and Operations Lee Mighdoll has left Twitter after 3 months, reports Silicon Alley Insider.
Peter Kafka quotes Biz Stone saying “both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect…We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our plan to scale Twitter as a company and as a service.”
Michael noted yesterday that Mighdoll was a key hire this year for Twitter, and his joins Blaine Cook in leaving Twitter this month. Given Mighdoll’s role, Twitter’s scaling issues may be a factor (more so given Stone mentions scaling) and yet Twitter praised Mighdoll when they hired him saying “his genuine enthusiasm for building global systems that operate at scale made him an easy choice.”
So what changed after such as short tenure?
Anecdotally Twitter uptime has been on the up this year in terms of reliability, particularly since they dumped Joyent for NTT. It’s not perfect (weekends this month haven’t been great), but given that Twitter’s uptime has improved, what’s really going on at Twitter? Management isn’t talking openly, but we’ve heard that the company is talking to VC’s about a new round (SAI reports likewise), despite the last round of $5.4million being 9 months old. The company still has no discernible source of income, outside of it’s Japanese licensing deal (if money changed hands…and that’s not a given), and if they’re chasing more money it can only mean the $5.4 million is running out. With zero revenue, Twitter is a flip or flop proposition, a likely proposition given that Biz Stone ran Blogger in a similar fashion (Blogger only had minimal revenue via premium subscriptions and no adverising before being sold to Google). As time rolls on, no one buys Twitter and the money runs out; is the stress this causes now being reflected by the management issues at Twitter? It makes more sense than scaling: if Cook was out due to scaling, why wait till now given the dramatic failures of last year? How can someone like Mighdoll, praised by Twitter, leave after such a short time if all was well at the management level of Twitter?
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VP Lee Mighdoll Out At Twitter, Business Plan Still MIA
Twitter VP Engineering and Operations Lee Mighdoll has left Twitter after 3 months, reports Silicon Alley Insider.
Peter Kafka quotes Biz Stone saying “both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect…We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our plan to scale Twitter as a company and as a service.”
Michael noted yesterday that Mighdoll was a key hire this year for Twitter, and his joins Blaine Cook in leaving Twitter this month. Given Mighdoll’s role, Twitter’s scaling issues may be a factor (more so given Stone mentions scaling) and yet Twitter praised Mighdoll when they hired him saying “his genuine enthusiasm for building global systems that operate at scale made him an easy choice.”
So what changed after such as short tenure?
Anecdotally Twitter uptime has been on the up this year in terms of reliability, particularly since they dumped Joyent for NTT. It’s not perfect (weekends this month haven’t been great), but given that Twitter’s uptime has improved, what’s really going on at Twitter? Management isn’t talking openly, but we’ve heard that the company is talking to VC’s about a new round (SAI reports likewise), despite the last round of $5.4million being 9 months old. The company still has no discernible source of income, outside of it’s Japanese licensing deal (if money changed hands…and that’s not a given), and if they’re chasing more money it can only mean the $5.4 million is running out. With zero revenue, Twitter is a flip or flop proposition, a likely proposition given that Biz Stone ran Blogger in a similar fashion (Blogger only had minimal revenue via premium subscriptions and no adverising before being sold to Google). As time rolls on, no one buys Twitter and the money runs out; is the stress this causes now being reflected by the management issues at Twitter? It makes more sense than scaling: if Cook was out due to scaling, why wait till now given the dramatic failures of last year? How can someone like Mighdoll, praised by Twitter, leave after such a short time if all was well at the management level of Twitter?
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Amateur Hour Over At Twitter?
It doesn’t really matter if Twitter’s Chief Architect Blaine Cook was fired or resigned. The important thing is that he’s gone now, and this gives Twitter the opportunity to hire someone (or a team) who may actually be able to scale the nearly two year old service and keep it live.
Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job. A year ago he spoke at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference about scaling Rails applications. His presentation suggested Twitter’s problems were behind them, but in fact some of their biggest stumbles hadn’t occurred yet. Note in particular slide 9 of that presentation, where Cook says about scaling Rails apps like Twitter: “It’s Easy. Really.” Whether Twitter’s woes were all on Cook’s shoulders or not, he should not have been boasting about solving the problem last year.
Meanwhile, Twitter has made at least three key hires this year on the technical side. Lee Mighdoll joined as VP Engineering and Operations in January. And this week they hired two scaling experts - John Kalucki and Steve Jenson (”known for his work scaling Blogger and Blogspot”).
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