Gubatron.com » Twitter

Facebook brings me 12 times more visits than Twitter

gubatron — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:04:03 +0000

Last night I saw this on my blog and other pages where I have Google Analytics installed to be let down by the amount of visitors that come from links seeded in Twitter feeds. The graphics above represent the amount of visits sent to my blog during the last 12 months from Facebook.com and Twitter.com.

What’s surprising is that I consider myself a Twitter addict (15,647 updates, 1500+ followers) and I hardly post updates on Facebook, however I’m getting 12 times more visits a year from Facebook. This has me thinking about how I should market my products and services on the social web.

Today, a reaffirming headline comes from the folks at Mashable “Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic”. Their numbers make sense against mine, Twitter only commands 8% of the Social Media Traffic.

I’m a heavy twitter user, I’m not spamming everyone, I try to tweet to be re-tweeted when it comes to links. I will only mention my products or services when I’m really proud of something or when I think something truly deserves to be shared because it’s cool.

However I think what’s obviously happenning when you look at Twitter vs Facebook is the following: In Twitter Nobody Is Listening, Everybody is Talking. In Facebook (at least someone like me) I have a circle of people that I actually know in real life, and they do care about what I say. I’ve a real life reputation and life track record in front of my peers, family and friends, and If I say something, they know I’m not spamming them, so they’re more likely to click, and recommend what I say.

The other thing that’s happening I think is that Twitter is still a small niche compared to Facebook. That 40% of the Social Media traffic means your mom and dad are on Facebook, and if they’re on Twitter they probably signed up and never used it again, they care more about their Facebook daily Gossip Dose or FarmVille addiction, which will eventually lead them to your wall, and to your links.

However, Twitter does prove to have a lot of mention to my products and services everyday (search.twitter.com), sometimes many times a day your brand could be mentioned, the question is, is anybody listening? is this bringing direct traffic that can’t be tracked? I’d like to pick your brains on the subject, I invite you to run the same reports on your Google Analytics, tell us what you find.

Why I believe Twitter is a billion dollar company

gubatron — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:45:20 +0000

Last night I read a post by Neal Wise called Twipocalypse Now: Warnings of a Twitter Bubble and this morning I feel the strong need to express a lot of the things I’ve experienced and learned from Twitter, and why I think this service, (which to me is the closest thing to being able to read a lot of people’s minds) has a potential billion dollar business up it’s sleeve if they play they cards right.

Starting with my personal Twitter History
According to TwitterHolic, I joined Twitter on February 28th 2007 at 7:53:01pm. Since then I’ve sent 9,880 updates (as of this blog post), or about 13 Twitter updates a day. That probably makes me an addict since day one, and I admit it.

First Twitter was fascinating because it was a lot of fun, sharing and getting to know a little better how some “internet friends”‘s lifes were like, and sharing mine with them. Now, I find myself using it in more advanced ways, and trying to analyze how trends are spread and what causes you to have an ever growing number of genuine loyal followers.

Twitter didn’t invent the idea of Micro blogging, I believe Jaiku has the credit for this, at the beginning we all opened accounts on as many services as possible (Jaiku, Twitter, identica, plurk, pwnce, friendfeed,…), but it seems Twitter’s simplicity (and board of directors and contacts) had the magic to grow virally like no other service in its field.

One thing they did right from the beginning is that they opened up the service with an accessible API for developers available from the very early days. I remember using a Python-Twitter and being fascinated with how easy it was, then I wrote integration scripts for (the almost deceased now) wedoit4you.com’s blog directory and twitter, for MyBloop.com, and scripts to send me direct messages which twitter would send to my cell phone via SMS when my linux servers were having trouble.

They had a very rough first year in terms of scalability (they still have some issues), the service was always going down, and for a time, I found myself cheating on it on plurk, service which I also found fascinating until I reached it’s “Nirvana“. Along the worth mentioning competitors there was also Pwnce.com which closed up shop last December, and I don’t blame them, they were probably in this to be number one, and they realized they just couldn’t keep up with Twitter’s popularity.

Many Twitter based services came along, and also many competitors including Facebook which copied the whole notification thing and put it on the facebook timeline feed, and it became really annoying cause with Twitter being down all the time you would be tempted to try Plurk for a while, and then ping.fm came along to post on all of them from one place.

Introducing Power Twitter
About a month ago, I found a Firefox extension called Power Twitter that made me abandon ping.fm for good, and therefore all the other micro blogging services. I’m doing all my micro blogging on twitter now.

Twitter likes to be proud of it’s simplicity, but I think little by little they will have to add functionality that us addict/advanced twitter users appreciate from extensions like Power Twitter. They should thank Power Twitter for bringing back some of us.

Where Twitter is now
So now that the Twitter service is a lot more stable, and it’s grown a lot in the past two years, it seems that it’s becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Every day you hear something on the TV, and Google News is a good way to see how much web press they get every few hours. This in my Internet business experience is the best thing that can happen to your company. The amount of genuinely interested traffic that press can get you can’t never be matched to any publicity campaign, so I’d say Twitter is already profitable by not having to spends tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in publicity.

But let’s see a little bit of numbers.

The following graphic is why I think Pwnce’s board made a wise decision to leave the race and move on to other things, they were in it to be number one or a close number two, but it didn’t happen, Twitter has no match in its arena as it is right now, and it’ll be very hard even for a company like Google to build something similar and compete, they’d be better off buying Twitter (but twitter can’t sell out for less than a 10 figure sum).

Monthly Visits: Twitter vs Jaiku vs Plurk. 54.2M as of Jan 09

As you can see, it’ll be very hard for the competitors to catch on, even for Jaiku which was the first to do this, and which got acquired by Google. As it is, they’re clearly the number one by several orders of magnitude. The others might have decent businesses going for them, but they won’t be a billion dollar landmark on the internet. Competition will always be good though.

So they beat everyone in their field very early, now it’s time to take over the world, let’s see what Twitter has to do to become a billion dollar company (be it on their own, or by valuation and acquisition)

Uniques: Twitter vs Facebook

This graphic shows unique visitor count according to compete.com for Twitter and Facebook until January 09. Twitter had 5.9 million unique visitors monthly at that time, today analysts are talking about 7 million uniques a month. Twitter is not a fool and that’s why they dind’t sell out to Facebook, they’re going for an user base as big (and of course bigger) than Facebook’s, which shows here some 68 million users as of January 09.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder has said it clearly too (and that’s why he didn’t sell out either), his goal is to connect EVERYBODY, so he’s probably looking to get traffic like that of Yahoo’s or Google’s 131 million unique visitors a day, and of course the whole planet the day we’re all finally using the internet the way we use electricity (that’s going to be a really interesting to live on).

So how can it make money you ask
Before you read this section, keep in mind that Twitter has already achieved $55 million dollars in funding. To have an idea how much this money can last, try to remember how YouTube used to spend around $1 million dollars monthly in bandwidth alone right before being acquired by Google. Twitter by no means eats that much bandwidth, and it’s a small operation of 29 employees. Making things expensive, put each employee at an average salary of $100k a year, plus let’s say $20k a month in (bandwidth, hardware, office) expenses to cover my basis, that would put their costs in around $4 million a year (I believe it’s much lower if they run things cheap like we do). They got enough money to run for 13 years if their costs didn’t grow, so let’s say they have enough money for sure to run for the next 5 years without making a penny, 5 years is a long time to make things happen on the internet. So in response to Neal’s Post, the internet and the whole financial system would have to go down for a Twipocalypse to happen, not even this economy, or a depression would make it go away, the service is FREE, and they got plenty of money to run it for a long time.

This graphic shows the number of Visits per month the site it’s getting (according to compete.com, it could be more). As of January 2009, this was 54 million visits a month. That makes around 10 visits a day per unique visitor, not bad at all, almost like email.

So let’s do a simple exercise, thinking very very small. If Twitter was run by a couple noobs that weren’t really ambitious and just wanted to make a good living off of it, they could be raking in right now, easy $12-$50 million a year without being very creative.

I’ve seen way smaller sites with good sales team selling CPM campaigns at $20, $25 and even higher. I cannot imagine a good sales team selling CPM campaings on a site like Twitter, which could be perfectly well targeted based on reading your twitter update history and that of your followers, your re-twitts, etc. Let’s use the numbers of January:

With only ONE Ad, and without growing the traffic:
54,000,000 visits at $20 CPM => $1,080,000

A small minded biz model with just ONE ad would bring now $12.96 million dollars a year minest $4M in costs and then effing taxes, would leave them with abour $4M cash in their pockets. Some people would settle for $4M a year, but this is petty cash for what it can make, and you could argue that it’s a very high CPM with this economy, but even with a lower CPM still it’d make enough to make the founders a decent living with a couple million dollars a year, my point is it can be monetized and run profitably without doing anything out of the ordinary. But of course, Twitter is not a million dollar business, it’s a billion dollar business.

Since they don’t show any obvious business model to the public now, there’s a lot of morons out there thinking the site can’t make money, or that Twitter “doesn’t know how it’s going to monetize…” YEAH RIGHT.

Still thinking on Ad-Revenue based business models, let your mind fly now, and think how much money they could make if they slowly showed us that they’re building a more powerful search engine (before Google deploys a Twitter search) and they had targeted ads on their search results just like Google’s #1 income source.

As they have more users sending updates, they’ll have more and more information about everything happening in the world, url recommendations from all over the world for the content that matters, from respectable twitter users, showing us the latest and most relevant content. If they could manage to index all of this information this information and searches would yield results as good as Google’s we have in our hands a billion dollar business with sponsored ads, just like Google’s #1 source of income.

I personally do a lot of searches every day on Twitter as it is and find a lot of stuff that’s more up to date than Google’s results, plus you find related people that know about the subjects you are looking for. That’s gotta have tremendous value for the company given that Search Traffic is the traffic that it’s monetized the best today on the web since it’s the one with the highest conversion rates for advertisers.

With it’s API alone, there’s already an ecosystem around it building companies, some may even be monetizing already and keeping it quiet. Twitter also, in another non-creative way, could charge for use of its API, but I think this would cripple their grow and deter companies away from using it. However it’s possible in the future they will have enterprise access to their API for large amounts of transactions per second and they could make a fortune on this alone, without even altering one bit the current user experience.

Another way it could be making a lot of money without ever changing the user experience would be to have data mining services for marketers. Subdivisions of Nielsen make hundreds of millions a year on data analysis services that big corporations pay for every month. Twitter has an awesome potential to analyze what people love, hate, want, bought, sold, go, read, do… only doing this I think it has one hell of a business model. It just needs to focus on growing enough so that they can have enough data to make it a really valuable source for analysis. And they’re focused on growing, growing, growing, that’s all that matters at this point.

Then, there’s other business ideas I won’t mention because I might pursue them myself, and there’s also the obvious exit strategy of getting bought by bigger companies when you have a billion dollar valuation. Potential buyers… Yahoo! for example is looking to grow it’s search by getting into social networks, I think Twitter is both an amazing social network and the next tool for searching the most up to date information. I’d even dare to call Twitter “a human powered search engine index of the most current information in the world”, and that also has to be appealing to @Google which only a week ago has created a few Twitter accounts and it’s a little scary to see Google for the first time interacting live with people, doing replies, and even RTs (Re-Tweets, a name for forwarding what others have twittered).

I hope that after doing this very simple analysis you also find it funny when you read or hear people saying that “Twitter doesn’t know how it’s going to make money”. No VCs in their right mind, in this economy, would drop $55 million dollars on a company that didn’t have their shit straight.

When I hear these kinds of comments, I feel glad there’s very naive or short sighted people in this world.

I feel better now, I just wish I could invest money in it. For now I’ll be glad to have a few more followers

Twitts of 2008-02-27

gubatron — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Ouch Michael Jackson might have to sell Neverland http://tinyurl.com/3c38kp #
Going to lunch break. Fixed Connection Starting bug in FrostWire!. We launch today 4.13.5 #
testing new secret feature of Joost #
try joost live here http://www.joost.com/2702experimentalliveclienttest.html #
wondering if joost live can scale, and if its actually p2p, starting to monitor traffic #
can’t wait to watch the TED live conferences this week #

Twitts of 2008-02-26

gubatron — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

At LGA, back in 1 piece #
To all the Blooploader users following this Twitter account, You guys rock!, but… Is that all you got? UPLOAD UPLOAD! #

Twitts of 2008-02-25

gubatron — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Survived driving a snowstorm on a dark icy road up and down in the rockies for about 40 miles. Now at outback eating. #
Raul Castro new president of Cuba? Omg? what a fucking surprise!! #
hmm, No country for old man, it was pretty good, but didn’t see that one coming. #
Stage6 bites the dust http://www.stage6.com/blog/107/ #
Having breakfast at Denver’s famous Annie’s cafe. #
Boarding Frontier Flight 516 from Denver to La Guardia. Let’s hope this won’t be my last twitt. #

Twitts of 2008-02-24

gubatron — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

back at the hotel in Denver, checking mail, refreshing to go have dinner at a Brazilian Churrasqueria #

Twitts of 2008-02-23

gubatron — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

High altitude makes me super tired after walking a couple blocks. Driving back to denver #
On i-25 s, headed to colorado springs, blasting 95.7fm. Its 34f. #
Sitting on the top of pikes peak. Inside the cog train, feeling light headed at a height of over 14000ft #

Twitts of 2008-02-22

gubatron — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

back on the hotel just in time for Lost #

Twitts of 2008-02-21

gubatron — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

uploading blooploader-0.5.dmg #
Wohoo, Edit in Place now in mybloop.com!!! Rename your files just like in flickr #
lunar eclipse right now in New York, suposedly, just went out didn’t see a thing and its too damn cold #
Sitting on gate b4 at LGA airport. Reading The End of Oil. #
Waiting for luggage at Denver, CO #
Eating bison for the first time #
Eating haagen-dazs cookies n cream and shooting pictures at pearl st, in boulder colorado. #

Twitts of 2008-02-19

gubatron — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

watching my wife sleeping like a baby #
viendo anuncio de retiro de fidel castro #
Aqui el video de Fidel http://tinyurl.com/3xtlrb #
es curioso como esperaron a que fuera martes para hacer el anuncio, ayer fue dia feriado en USA y nadie lo hubiera visto. #
Esto tiene que ser lo mas estupido que he oido en mi vida (cont) #
"si hay escasez es porque ahora los venezolanos tienen mÃ¡s dinero y comen mÃ¡s" Toro Hardy. … El cono de tu madre #
giving my 10 year old sister some Rock education, we did an hour of queen, now we’re doing metallica. #
@infelix: +1. Raul Castro es peor de sanguinario que Fidel. #
Tirandome un set the Aerosmith en MyBloop http://tinyurl.com/2vgu93 #
How to implement a single world government? Idea #1: Spoof an alien invasion #
viendo perfil de ald en mybloop #

Twitts of 2008-02-18

gubatron — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

@chiguire: lmao con lo del juego del reten de catia, share more about it #

Twitts of 2008-02-17

gubatron — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Listening to Paraguana Sound System #26 at oyesto.com #
Yahoo! bloquea pirate bay de sus resultados http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=?p=piratebay.org&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp #
Ouch, Yahoo keeps loosing talent, they’ve axed the entire Yahoo Innovation Team #

Twitts of 2008-02-16

gubatron — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

FrostWire runs on Starbucks #
@CamonZ: You need to download, make and make install "sip" from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/download.php #
@CamonZ: After you’re done with sip, you should downoad Qt4 from trolltech, configure, make install… #
@CamonZ: Once you’re done with Qt4, you’ll need PyQt4. This one you also get from RiverBankComputing. #
@dchang, no se si pillaste que hace como 2 semanas pusieron un linkcito arriba para ignorar todas las peticiones… #
@Nosg: Generalmente sale casi que hora y media despues. Fue medio pajistico el episodio de ayer. #
Alguien recuerda cual de los relojes en Lost estaba atrasado 30 minutos? El del projectil? #
De estar atrasado el reloj del proyectil, quiere decir que viajo a la velocidad de la luz en algun momento, o paso por algo similar a … #
un hoyo negro. El proyectil viajo al futuro practicamente. #
Estoy hablando del episodio de Lost de anoche #
yo pienso que Dharma fue wiped out long time ago, de hecho Ben es culpable de eso, y la expedicion es para atraparlo finalmente. #
Estamos empezando a creer que el tiempo en la isla pasa 30 veces mas lento, esto explicaria muchas cosas. #
Como por ejemplo, los Otros que vivian desde antes en la isla, aun son jovenes. El pq fuera de la isla encontraron el avion… #
que la gente de afuera se sorprende por TANTO tiempo sobreviviendo en la isla, y porque se trajeron un fisico para hacer el experimento #
Up early with a lot of energy, life’s only one. #
can’t help to do a little techcrunching this morning. #
Convenience is key for success #
Katay corre Blooploader desde los fuentes en Ubuntu, en China #
Viendo video de SD en Alt1040.com, me pregunto como haria yo para meter 15mil fotos de 4 anos :p, Supongo que tendria que reducir a las 8500 #

Twitts of 2008-02-15

gubatron — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

What’s mybloop? It’s potentially a free CDN for every web master in the world. #
@huguito: Voy a citarte en el blog de MyBloop! #
Post sobre quote de Huguito -> http://tinyurl.com/2maz52 #
Termino de escuchar el Top 10 del billboard en MyBloop.com #
Instale el toolbar de 8aweek.com para monitorear como pierdo el tiempo. la semana que viene vere si bloqueo lo que mas me haga perder tiempo #
daydreaming about iPod/blooploader integration…hmmm #
Bear Attack! Warning Explicit pictures http://www.secondose.com/bear-attack/ ;) #
My Xbox 360 came back from its trip to Texas. No more red ring of death #
@alexm: it was the damn recent comments crappy php right? #
@huguito: Pa que no digas que soy pichirre puse el playlist -> http://tinyurl.com/3c3vuc #
@sd Oh the Shake Shack, best burguers ever #

Twitts of 2008-02-14

gubatron — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Jerico, Season 2, Ep 1 here http://www.veoh.com/videos/v4226200myzkMASN #
ohhhh, ubuntu users might get the blooploader soon http://manatlan.infogami.com/py2deb #
@joserojas: whoops, me entero que ya liberamos el lanzamiento de la cuenta pro, hasta tengo entendido aun no estabamos listos #
Buenos dias, Feliz Hallmark Day, May all your emails be flooded with stupid eCards. May your night be the hottest of this week. #
And it’s sunny again in New York, after 2 days of not knowing where the sun was #
Currently Browsing: http://tinyurl.com/328m6z #
Escuchando Playlist de JairoB http://tinyurl.com/328m6z #
@infelix "Me da miedo entrar a Facebook hoy", LOL, es el twitt mas comico del dia. #
@alexm Faliz dia #
thinking how badly mybloop begs for graphic design #
thinking: it’s so cool to finally understand Michael Jackson fully, something I always dreamed of as a kid when I didn’t speak english. #
Blooping "Michael Jackson’s – Pretty Young Thing" >> http://mybloop.com/go/v3ge3R #
@alexm LOL con lo de salamandra, te hicieron quedar mal? #
Uploading a lot of freeware to http://www.mybloop.com/freeware #
wondering how much do you really need to spend to make a site like Knocka.tv and why so much money has been burnt on it #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-13

gubatron — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Uploading to flickr pictures of yesterday’s snow, leaving to the Gym, it rains today :( #
Wishing Microsoft buys Yahoo and fucks google in the ass with a decent Advertising platform. Fucking google bullies on sites #
MyBloop Request: Alguien tiene que jode music de Sandy Papo? Plz upload some #
"La NaciÃ³n mÃ¡s rica de AmÃ©rica nada en petrÃ³leo y se ahoga en dÃ³lares, pero no tiene leche, ni huevos, ni carne, ni papa." Fernando Londono #
La Nacion mas rica de America nada en petroleo y se ahoga en dolares, pero no tiene leche, ni huevos, ni carne, ni papa. – Fernando Londono #
Blooploading with the Blooploader – Beta test coming out great #
Stumbleando el sitio que menciono Huguito caraqueando.com #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-12

gubatron — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Mac-MyBloop users you can take it for a beta ride http://tinyurl.com/2sq9ce #
just watched the Knight Rider commercial, starting this sunday at 9pm on NBC, let’s see if it becomes a hit #
scanning a document for my buddy Daniel #
sipping on Dunkin Donut coffe on my starbucks mug, preparing blooploader-updates.zip for windows users thanks to beta tester feedback #
all while blasting Dance Department Podcast all over the office #
Orgasmo auditivo en el "coro" de la cancion http://mybloop.com/go/d2M1c9 DJ Sasha Who Killed Sparky #
es un crimen no escucharla a todo volumen #
If I could vote, I’d vote for Obama #
finally it’s snowing decently in New York #
@alexm: Estas seguro que son 100 ips diferentes, o que son 10 personas haciendo 10 conexiones (imagenes, html, css) #
@alexm: pon todas tus imagenes, css, y todo contenido estatico en otra maquina #
@alexm: en la maquina que tengas contenido estatico, no pongas apache, pon nginx o lighttpd, apache es una mierda sirviendo archivos #
Snow! yes moooore mooore!! Show me more Snow New York!!! Make it up for all the snow we didn’t have!!! don’t stop! 6 feet of snow!!! snow ! #
Today Jericho Season 2, on CBS, yay, at 10pm #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-11

gubatron — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

freezing morning today, -10C, although its sunny and clear. #
que trizte ver el mundo dia tras dia lleno de seres intelectualmente inferiores. Aunque bueh… vivan los brutos que de ellos vivimos. #
My XBOX 360 left the repair center today, its coming back home via fedex. #
@Jairob Si quieres te mando un DMG, lo unico es que todavia le falta el icono #
@Jairob Bienvenido sea tu icono! #
Si alguien esta teniendo problemas con MyBloop es pq se acaban de quemar 2 disco duros, no worries, no files have been lost, repairing. #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-09

gubatron — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

upoading the closed beta release of the Blooploader v0.4 #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-08

gubatron — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Lost, Season 4, Ep 2, Has started #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-07

gubatron — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

Blooploader v0.4 99% ready to go #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-06

gubatron — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

watching animatrix on joost #
reading MySpace Developer Platform documentation (openSocial) http://developer.myspace.com/community/myspace/index.aspx #
removed everybody I really didn’t know from my twitter #
How Apple’s Office look like (yeah in Cupertino) http://tinyurl.com/2kxtbd #

Twitts in a Nutshell for 2008-02-05

gubatron — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 06:59:59 +0000

learning git version control, this shit rocks #
big day for america today, wish I could vote #
So why do I need to buy gifts for Valentine’s? didn’t we do that shit already last year? Effing bullshit commercial holidays, xmas is enough #
funny how google is scared trying to convince Yahoo! not to sell out. #
coding my ass off to dominate free online storage on the internet #
Alabando a los Dioses de bash, "grep", "diff" y "patch" #