by We love it when our prescience is proven right in the marketplace. In March, we predicted the demise of Twitter, and today, we have growing evidence that Twitter will soon be going toes up.
Now, if you want to get a lot of hate mail, say something even slightly negative about Twitter and all the TweetBois will be on you like Spitzer on a hooker.
Twitter is the new defensive indefensible for the fanatical. Other similar examples from the past include: Star Trek, The Three Stooges, Star Wars, Child Beauty Pageants and the baby Jesus.
Despite the fanaticism surrounding 140 character Tweets-as-something-interesting, the numbers don’t lie. Twitter is going toes up:
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s 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.
To understand why this poses a problem for Twitter, check out the chart below. By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.
When you lose the Oprah, as of April 28, 2009, you’ve lost the world:
Oprah Winfrey is one of the most famous people on Twitter, with a huge following. But it seems she is already bored with the messaging/microblogging service.
It’s been almost four days since @Oprah last sent a tweet, asking Hugh Jackman if he wanted to catch dinner. In total, she’s sent 20 tweets in 11 days. Almost half are from April 17, Oprah’s first day on Twitter, when Ashton Kutcher and Twitter CEO Evan Williams appeared on her show.
We here at the Boles Blogs Network run our stories through Twitter — just to keep up with the madding crowd — but we’d love nothing more than to bury a technology that degrades the mind and represses the creative spirit.
We’re tired of pretending 140 character stutters of broken thoughts could ever pass for cogent dialogue, information of value or as something memeingful for the masses.
It does seem like a lost cause but it’s still pretty fun for some of us – but that’s about all, just fun 🙂
I’m reading rumors today, Gordon, that Apple is supposed to buy Twitter for $700 million? Good grief, why?
How do you feel about the twitter role in the current Iranian revolution – seems like it’s playing a bigger role than a web site ever has in this kind of situation 🙂
I think it’s sad. Twitter is doing the job of the mainstream media. Unfortunately, Twitter streams are unverified and unedited and solely written. That makes Tweets unreliable and archaic and easy to exploit.