Twitter receives 26M tweets per day, 22% are URLs

Posted at October 21, 2009

There has been almost no day in which, for a reason or the other, Twitter was not in the news. Millions of people love Twitter, others hate it, but everybody cannot seem to be able to stop talking about it. Sure, it is down almost once a day (but that is news too!) and they cannot find a way to monetize the service (although today they just signed a deal with Microsoft and Google, that will help), but its adoption has been massive.

Due to my researches at the University of Iowa, I look at the Twitter stream at least twice a day. After reading the Mashable article in which they claimed that looking at Compete’s numbers Twitter growth flatlined, I decided to take a look by myself.

According to my most recent studies Twitter currently receives about 26 Million tweets per day. It is impressive, especially if you consider that in January 2009 they were hovering around “only” 2.4 Million daily tweets!

As you can see from the graph attached to this post, the number of tweets started growing exponentially at the end of last year (2008), but decreased this month, going from an average of 27.8 Million tweets/day in September 2009 to “only” 25.9 Million in October 2009.

Twitter usage patterns changed drastically since they started. Long gone are the days in which it was used to keep in touch with friends and family, nowadays a growing number of people use this service as an RSS feed reader or to share pictures, videos or links that they like.

My latest analysis of the stream say that in October 2009 about 22.3% of all the tweets contain a link. We are talking about almost 5.8 Million of URLs exchanged every day! Of those, 6.2% are pictures and almost 0.1% are videos.

No wonder many companies (e.g., OneRiot, Collecta, Tweetmeme) started fetching and indexing those links to create human-powered realtime search engines. And now, Bing and Google are in that game too.