Twitter Reaches 200 Million Tweets A Day, But How Many Come From Bots?

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

Twitter just crossed another huge milestone. People are now sending 200 million tweets per day across the service. This is up from 65 million tweets per day a year ago, or about 200 percent growth in a year. Last March, Twitter reported 140 million tweets per day last March. Way back in January, 2009 people were only sending 2 million tweets per day.

Well, “people” is perhaps a generous term. Twitter is filled with automated bots Tweeting out, as well as feeds from publishers. It is not clear how many of those 200 million Tweets a day are automated versus individually hand-crafted. And a small percentage of power users (maybe 20,000 total) reportedly account for half of all Tweets with links, for example, (although this is based on a study that only looked at data through March, 2010 and may now be outdated).

But other data suggests that Twitter’s audience keeps on growing. ComScore estimates that Twitter.com alone attracted 139 million unique visitors worldwide in May, 2011, a 54 percent annual increase. On a worldwide basis, Twitter is bigger than MySpace. In the U.S., however, traffic is up only 12.5 percent to Twitter.com, which attracted an estimated 27 million unique visitors in May, 2011.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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