60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month

The Web has seen its share of hype, but I think Twitter is pushing it to new levels.

Most people don't really need or even understand Twitter's functionality. Those who do are getting it from Facebook. But the best part is that the numbers actually reflect this. 6 million users in 3 years of constant hype is not a high number. (Just to put it in perspective: I once contracted for a company that produced a shopping toolbar. Nothing viral, no PR to speak of, nice but not amazing functionality. 3 million downloads in a year.)

Any journalist could have deducted as much just looking at the user count. A slightly more serious one might actually use it for a while, and see how many of her followers are "SEO marketers", brands and other spammers. And yet the puff pieces continue. Personally, I think the best value we're getting from Twitter is in reminding us how incredibly poor, shiny object driven our media is, from Oprah all the way to Maureen Dowd.

I’m Twitter’s bigger detractor but this seems dubious to even me. People see the name Nielsen and think its gold because of their dominance in TV ratings. But the reality is they put their numbers behind a pay wall so they aren’t scrutinized by enough people to determine just how accurate they are. Combine that with the fact that their methodology doesn’t necessarily work at all when measuring web traffic and you have numbers that mean very little.

With that said, I can see a decent amount of people dropping Twitter soon after trying it. Twitter’s usefulness isn’t immediately apparent which gives them a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to see why Twitter works for some people you have to be active on it and have a group of friends who are also active on it. But in order to get that you have to see why it’s useful.

The facebook stream is just completely winning against twitter. It's usable. You don't have to worry about 140 characters, you can post vids, pics that actually show up inline, and comments show up under each post.

For the "keep up with what friends are doing" use case, there's no comparison.

Either twitter will need to adapt - and fast, or I suspect they'll die.

Keeping 40% is a good number

As they put in their update, they aren't able to track 3rd party services. Considering 50% of all Twitter users use Twitter through 3rd party applications, that is probably a huge chunk.

However, I wouldn't be suprised if Twitter doesn't have a good retention rate. Especially if you don't go into it with friends, starting out on Twitter is a little hard, and takes time to build up your stream of information and relationships with other people.

Naah, it's probably guys like me who are grabbing up names for all their projects, domains, family and friends, and waiting to see if we ever need them.

It's all about network effects. I think the hype is bad for Twitter, it makes people aware of the service before any of their friends are on there, so they try it, subscribe to Stephen Fry and Jeff Atwood and then give up.

Me and a few of my friends in the UK .net development world are on there but we go days between tweets because that's what everyone else is doing. There's no conversation for me at the moment. At this point I'm just sitting on my user account and waiting for the network to become worth being a part of.

In reality the # is probably a lot higher. They just come back to see if they had any activity

What about API accesses? http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/statuses/1644880255

As pointed out in the update to the article, this isn't counting those who switch to using Twitter clients, which as the comment points out, accounts for about 70% of total tweets.

"As discussed in the comments, Nielsen is only able to measure return visits to Twitter.com: how many people set up a desktop application like TweetDeck (TweetDeck reviews) and continue to Tweet, but never return to Twitter.com? "

on the other hand, having to set up additional software just to make one's twitter stream sensical, is a large barrier to entry. i bet more people get turned away than take the next step.

Perhaps a better metric would be tweets. Should be easy to scrape everyone's first and last tweet. Though there's lots of spam accounts now too.

Yea I created an account, logged in, tried to add my first contact. I had the message that an error occured, retry later. I retried something like 3 times and I had a message that my account was blocked due to suspicious activities... Great for a first time... I never connected again.

That's nothing, I quit before I even started using it.

But the ones that use TwitterFox seldom quit :)

Answer = Oprah factor

She did a terrible job using / teaching her audience about it, and all the moms at home give it a shot, don't get any value out of it, and quit.

Not to single out just Oprah, celebrities in general have done a great job decreasing the value.