John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, parent company to bit.ly, twitterfeed, tweetdeck, chartbeat, and many other interesting web services, posted yesterday on “Ongoing tracking of the real time web …”
Through these various Betaworks companies, John and the team have
access to a tremendous amount of data and if you are interested in this
subject, you really should read John’s post.
I develop many of my theses based on what I see happening on this
blog. And I’ve been seeing something on this blog that has gotten my
attention.
Traffic is way up to this blog in the first half of January. This
blog has seen as many visits in the first half of January as a normal
month.
So I went to Google Analytics to find out why. And I didn’t see
anything particularly new and different in the first half of this month.
But that direct number bugs me so I sent John an email to see what I
could learn. The first thing I learned is that he was planning a post
(link above) on this exact topic. And he sent me some data on the
clicks to avc.com from bit.ly in the first half of January. Here’s a
snapshot from John’s email to me:
Now,
where would Google analytics be capturing those 35,147 clicks? Well
Twitter.com for sure. But that’s only 7,567. Could the other ~28,000
clicks be in the “direct” number? I am absolutely positive that a bunch
of them are.
But think about this for a second. Of the 35,000
clicks I got from bit.ly in the first half of January, only 20% of them
came from Twitter.com. So exactly how big is Twitter.com vs the Twitter
ecoystem?
Well, let’s go back to John’s post and pull my favorite chart out of it:
John’s
chart estimates that Twitter.com is about 20mm uvs a month in the US
(comScore has it at 60mm uvs worldwide) and the Twitter ecosystem at
about 60mm uvs in the US.
That says that across all web services,
not just AVC, the Twitter ecosystem is about 3x Twitter.com. And on
this blog, whose audience is certainly power users, that ratio is 5x.
Just
to double check, because this is a seriously big deal, I checked all
the links I bit.ly “ized” this past 30 days. Here’s where they were
clicked on:
So
the links I put out into Twitter in the past 30 days generated almost
39,000 clicks. Nice. But only 10,000 of those clicks happened on
Twitter.com. The rest happened elsewhere in the Twitter ecosystem,
including Facebook which is part of the Twitter ecosystem when they
showcase a post that is generated on Twitter, as all of mine are.
So
that’s a 4x ratio. That’s a good double check. Whether its 3x (John’s
post), 4x (my links), or 5x (incoming traffic to AVC), it is clear that
there’s a big difference between the two.
My point is this. You
can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter
ecosystem. One is a Web site. The other is a fundamental part of the
Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former
and that delta is likely to grow even larger.
(For more from Fred, visit his blog)
(Image source: Hammock.com)
