Much is being written today about the value of a large following on Twitter. Jason Calacanis wants to pay $125,000 a year to have Twitter recommend him to other users, for example. He thinks that over time accounts with massive followings will somehow be able to pull in $1 million a year or more in incremental revenue, assuming they then have millions of followers.
We have unique data to share because our TechCrunch Twitter account was made one of the suggested accounts on Twitter earlier this year. On February 11 we had 65,573 hard earned followers. By March 1 that had jumped to 158,708 followers. Today it stands at 217,187.
So in just over a month the number of Twitter followers to the TechCrunch account has nearly quadrupled. What I want to know is what kind of traffic that’s sending to TechCrunch, and what value that might have.
Our recent referral traffic from Twitter is shown in the chart below. This only includes traffic from Twitter directly, it doesn’t include third party clients or Twitter Search.
My suspicion is that most of the new followers aren’t hard core TechCrunch fanatics and wouldn’t be as valuable as the follower that we “earned” prior to being added to the suggested list. So far the data is confirming this.
Traffic from Twitter spiked in January, before we were added to the list, growing from 67,000 page views to 130,000 in that month. In February, when follow number spiked upwards, traffic actually dipped to 111,000 page views. The first 11 days in March have brought in 53,000 page views from Twitter, suggesting the month will end up around 150,000.
If the March data holds, that tells us that 65,573 hard core users brought us 130,000 January page views. Nearly quadrupling that number of followers will only bring in an extra 20,000 page views in March.
We love these new users, but they aren’t nearly as valuable to us as the ones that we fought for in the early days of Twitter. We’ll update this post later with more data as we collect it.
excellent analysis. user intent is important, which why Google introduced SmartPricing before the advertisers bailed.
Michael,
It would be great if you could provide some analysis on what each of these new incremental users are worth to you in terms of incremental ad revenue.
Anjali Sen
Yeah. You cover the “amount” portion but don’t get close to mentioning the “value” portion. I visit TC multiple times a day, and I never look at the ads. In fact, I don’t even notice the sidebar at all.
@anon
Ditto. Please leep in mind that the above comment is another attempt by the “babes From India” to sound important while she keeps shamelessly spamming Techcrunch.
Shame, shame on her!
anon,
I disagree a little bit there. Like you, I visit TC several times a day, and because of that, I put one of my clients on GoGrid (since removed- too pricey). Point being, like the old adage goes “if you stay in a barber shop long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut”. Traffic quality does have a direct correlation to click-through rates, but without the introductory junk traffic, you won’t get quality visitors. I think that’s where Twitter works in this context.
As for Babes, I think it would be super cool if he/she teamed up with spamlocator, and came up with smartsexybabeslocator.com. Bad blog + bad Ning site + smart sexy babes- now you’re cookin with gas!
+1 to the “Are there ads on TechCrunch” group
smartbabes will you marry me!
my name is not twittle. twittle is an awfully horrendous site. the MyLocator platform has more custom strategic niche social offerings, functionality and promise than twittle could ever imagine. twittle should sell or merge before their hula hoop hits the ground. twittle will never be a key master gateway that users and businesses social channel through. i have found nothing on the net with more promise than mine. when you have a tangible link instead of head gas please share it with us.
CookingLocator.com – make something
>FollowLocator.com – Gee, man! I almost lost my lunch reading your comment…. What an image, you marrying the “babes” and spamming forever after from the slums of Delhi.
It is [not] interesting that someone in TC put you guys together on a comment – Spam for everybody!
I see now why you have been hammered by a guy calling him self “Stupid Spammers From India”
I see you are commenting almost on every article that I happen to see and the interesting thing is that you have this pattern of writing your comment as a reply for the first comment. Your reply most of the time has nothing to do with the comment to which you are replying.
Now I see you as more of like a spammer than an honest user as a result I am somehow becoming annoyed by your comments.
Agreed.
agreed. For some reason, I still don’t think Twitter followers provide TOO MUCH value for some reason….but I could be wrong as apparently Dell was very successful during the last holiday season….I’m still skeptical, though.
A great example of quality vs. quantity.
blog.allisinc.com
Twitter is over-rated TC you got any other articles besides twitter this twitter that?? Put on a new record and spin it because your too obsessed with twitter. If you guys love twitter so much then get a room. Damn.
I think twitter is great for creating initial transaction but content and services offered by a site creates stickiness. I think twitter at a certain point may deliver dimensioning returns. Therefore your site must pick up where it leaves off.
what? no Loic LeMeur in the list of suggested friends?? he’s going to have a heart attack! Twitter hates French people?
not “transaction” but “traction” I caught it first!
Thanks for sharing. Shows that more is not always better. Although that added following doesn’t hurt if it comes for free I am not sure if I’d pay what JC is proposing.
140k pvs? myspace related sites can attract that kind of traffic in hours vs a whole month
That number is drastically undercounted.
Only visits from Twitter.com will show it as a referrer. People using desktop clients like Twitterific, Tweetdeck, etc. will show up without a referrer when they visit.
I put a source variable in the query string of any link I post to Twitter for the corporate accounts I manage. About 39 out of 40 clicks comes from a client instead of Twitter.com.
These new users aren’t as valuable as the one earned before… I understand that, but they still increase your page views and CPM. No?
Well pages views yes, but CPM may actually go down depending on the types of ads.
Mike, assuming you can monetize all those visits at a really high $20 CPM across all those pageviews then twitter is bringing you an extra $2000 a month approximately.
So according to Jason’s logic if he wanted to make back a 120K investment for a year then you’d need to have 2M twitter followers to make back a 120K investment for the year.
But then all the money you make after that would be free cash.
So I guess if Jason thinks he can get to 2M followers on twitter, and if he’s willing to spam the hell out of them with links (i would) – then maybe his logic isn’t so far off
but that’s a whole lot of assumptions….
$20 CPM is pretty outrageous though
$20 CPM???
Jason, I think that assumption by itself makes no sense.
Anjali
you need to check your math. even at $20 CPM, which is absurdly high, 20k page views is worth $400. And – most of our ads are sold at a flat rate anyway, not CPM.
MA your data above shows 130,000 visitors for January not 20,000.
The point of this particular thread is that Jason Nazar would spam the hell out of people if he could; and he likely does.
so are you suggesting, michael, that selling ‘featured user’ slots isn’t THE revenue model twitter’s been looking for?
i think people (self-proclaimed social media geniuses) will still pay for the opportunity and i think this was the obvious play from the beginning, so long as they didn’t bring it up until they won the space.
well who is the stupid will pay for this ?
some people don’t get the idea of social proof yet
yes. indeed. Who IS the stupid?
Techcrunch twitter feed has a 2% CRT rate
#Page views / Avg pageviews/ (# followers in Feb*#day in Feb)
do you agree?
I would be interested to get RSS CTR versus Twitter
from personal experience RSS CTR range from 30% to 50%
Great insight. i’m going to check my numbers tonight and use it for one of my company’s KPIs.
Interesting. I’m trying a little experiment with twitter.com/ticketfeed, a channel for users to discover tickets/events. It might give us insight into the potential power of the platform.
Also, on similar lines, launched twitter.com/lastmovie, a sort of Twitter IMDB.
That’s about 5,000 page views a day. Techcrunch must get a lot of RTs.
Excellent post
Very informative, Now i just need to grow my following to get a good test in numbers. thanks for this.
While I agree with Mike that the newbie Twitter followers post-recommended home page spot aren’t as valuable as the old followers judging by the numbers he shared, I would imagine there is a big opportunity in using the Techcrunch Twitter account to reach out to those new followers and convert them to hardcore fans.
Hardcore fans will generate the CPM’s rather than those that visit a couple of times per month. But how can Techcrunch convert these new followers? There’s a secret sauce in here somewhere that will make those new followers just as valuable.
The allure of a top dog on twitter stems from the breadth of info they digest and disseminate, value doesn’t lie with the person but rather their place in the hierarchy?
And twitter devalues every site; the pipe is the thing..
Excellent analysis, but I would argue that the first hardly earned users were also “early adopters” and metrics based on early adopters are always tricky.
I would like to learn
-Of the new Twitter users how many do really use the service and understand/like it and how many drop after signing up or a few logins?
-would the value of the new users brought in by suggestion increase if it were to be targeted?
On the flipside, it would be interesting to see how much traffic that TechCrunch has send to Twitter over this period of time.
(Lest’s face it, you do post a lot of stories about Twitter which have no doubt, helped them grow in traffic. One could view this as you’re finally reaping some reward for the help you’ve given them.)
i’ve been looking at a lot of referrer logs for our portfolio companies and seeing how much traffic twitter and facebook are driving and analyzing the quality of that traffic.
a couple trends i am seeing
1) twitter and facebook are rising fast in the refer logs and are starting to deliver meaningful traffic. not google scale yet, but moving up rapidly
2) the conversion rates (on ecommerces sites) for these two services are surprisingly good. i guess that makes sense because someone you know or follow is sending out the link.
i’d post the data but it comes from our portfolio and its confidential so i can’t.
thankfully you have done that and i hope others do the same.
Fred, I believe Twitter is now a bigger overall referrer to us than Digg. Confirming that now. It’s still a small percentage of overall traffic and nowhere near Google or Yahoo, but Twitter is meaningful in terms of traffic.
on my side twitter is a 2% CTR (looks like it is the same for Techcrunch)
RSS feed have less subscribers but higher CTR (up to 50%)
do you have the same experience? what is your CTR on Digg?
regards
I have been quietly observing a different aspect of this data, and I could have guessed the percentage pretty well, if not the hard numbers;
the dip in traffic was directly affected by whether Mike Arrington was Twittering, or not.
(Including the growing knowledge among Twitter users that posts wouldn’t be by him during the month off).
This is no slight to the other bloggers, as I would expect it at other top blogs as well.
The conversion rates for ecommerce sites is high because internet affilaites are spamming like crazy. Over time this will level off. For now this will stay as a large percentage of high traffic.
The facebook and twitter comparison is interesting. For example, my father who is 70 years old has a iPhone and facebook account. However I just don’t believe he will ever get a twitter account. I’m in my 30’s and have a twitter account. But honestly have not found the value in using it. My friends also have not adopted it. On one hand this is going to be a challenge twitter but on the other this represents a large untapped market.
Fred, you may want to make a small disclosure?
Mike, as Fred suggested … more data please! That would be great.
Here is your disclosure, you fat retard: you are a disgusting, shameless and clueless spammer trying to get more traffic to your horrible blog! Now, call on Arrington to block comments you don’t like…
why doesn’t twitter suggest users who have fewer followers but post great stuff? All the ones I’ve seen suggested so far are only people with large followers already like @dooce etc. Why just keep feeding the same small group? They could build tons of loyalty by featuring people who use fanatically but aren’t in the top list….
Small point to make – I’d guess the dip is in part due to:
1) 31 days in Jan vs 28 in Feb.
2) Huge uptick for Twitter on and around Inauguration Day (Jan 21).
Oops, Jan 20!
No matter how you slice it, Twitter is playing an ever increasing role in its ability to deliver traffic.
@DonRoberts
Twitter still seems to have some horrible backend issues with huge accounts.
Quite often I see Twitter playing “catchup” even with replies and direct messages, where one reply will suddenly appear in my replies timeline inserted between messages I have already seen.
Sometimes I see retweets of Techcrunch stories before seeing the original.
This doesn’t surprise me.
I am not sure of the delivery speed these days of dedicated email boxes, but it is something around 300K emails per hour from a decent service provider.
As your number of Twitter followers increases, it may well be the case that your dedicated readers will have already read something before it appears on the Twitter timeline (if they are using Web)
Add to this the growth in following by many in recent months and whilst the numbers on the surface suggest growing popularity, the CTR can go down.
More dedicated users are moving to other clients.
Twitter followers doesn’t compare with email, nowhere near unless there is a viral “RT” frenzy.
I typically get 1-2% CTR on most links.
You can track real data with Google analytics, but you would have to build a feed with the tracking links, and then use that feed with Twitterfeed.
So the cost of being suggested by twitter is either $125,000 or running a successful web startup blog and plugging twitter 3 times a week.
haha kidding. Speaking of this though, does anyone know what determines the order of the 100 suggested? That’s pretty important as well.
I already follow you at my tweet and about the traffic at twitter it does useful to get a link back when it a blog and information type information which not inviting People “to buy something”.in the head of not “buy mode”invitations twitter do helps gaining traffic
The broader your value as a Tweeter, the more the new users will be worth getting. Mike’s right – many of these people are not interested in Web tech in and of itself. For New York Times, CNN, Coldplay, the_real_shaq or Rumer Willis, this could be more valuable. Perez Hilton, TMZ, People, etc. would also tend to get more out of this.
Calacanis would find the same trend in his traffic as TechCrunch (likely even less) — most n00bs couldn’t care less about the rantings of some hyper-inflated ego nerd. Now, Barack Obama on the other hand…
thanks for sharing the data
I agree! You probably wouldn’t have as much of an influence over those followers who “aren’t hard core TechCrunch fanatics”, but who were pointed your way by Twitter. Having said that, I believe that the more eyes you have on your content (Tweets in this case) the better! Even though those new followers might not regularly read TechCrunch, it doesn’t mean that they’d bypass a juicy tweet/link. Good content is the key to gaining the trust and respect of your followers, which in turn adds to your influence over them.
So here’s the question, is there anyone reading this that got here from twitter?
yes
Yes. This is, I think, the forth time I’ve followed a link from Twitter to TC. Never heard of it before that.
Traffic to FBT from Twitter has been converting to subscribers (the goal) better than search traffic or forum advertising, average page views per visit is also higher. Adsense clicks are about the same.
I would rate the visitor quality as good for our particular business model.
As Twitter gets more mainstream, I wonder how its use will change. Will people start using it more for the inane conversation and less as an information sharing and learning network? Maybe this has something to do with the statistics?
The analysis interests me, and I read it a few times, yet I keep asking looking for reasons why beyond people finding you, and you promoting yourself to them.
You must be one of those people who does not think before speaking.
Interesting article. Makes me hope I’m _never_ put on Twitter’s suggested list.