{"id":1260,"date":"2009-04-28T15:43:11","date_gmt":"2009-04-28T21:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1260"},"modified":"2009-04-28T15:43:11","modified_gmt":"2009-04-28T21:43:11","slug":"the_fickle_twit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1260","title":{"rendered":"The fickle Twitterer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s entryway. The second biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s exit.<\/p>\n

Twitter’s recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching<\/a> an estimated 14 million. This month, with Ashton’s Million Follower March and Oprah’s First Tweet, the Twitter flock has almost certainly swelled even more quickly. Everybody who’s anybody is giving Twitter a whirl.<\/p>\n

But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study<\/a> out today from Nielsen, at least three out of every five people who sign up for a Twitter account bail within a few weeks:<\/p>\n

\n

Currently, more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter\u2019s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month\u2019s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even Oprah, it seems<\/a>, may already be losing interest. Of the 20 tweets she’s issued since joining Twitter 11 days ago, half came on her first day. She’s made nary a tweet in the last four days.<\/p>\n

The half-life of a microblog, it turns out, is even briefer than the half-life of a blog.<\/p>\n

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site\u2019s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren\u2019t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”<\/p>\n

The FT’s David Gelles says<\/a> that Twitter’s weak retention numbers “give good reason to think that Facebook, with its 200m users and robust retention rates, has little to fear from the flurry of interest in Twitter.” That remains to be seen. Even a modest boost in Twitter’s retention rate would improve its long-term prospects significantly. But if Nielsen’s numbers are accurate, and if they don’t improve, Twitter may turn out to be the CB radio of Web 2.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s entryway. The second biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter’s exit. Twitter’s recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching an estimated 14 million. This month, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}