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60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month

43 points by jasonlbaptiste 18y ago

ivankirigin 18y ago
What about API accesses? http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/statuses/1644880255 http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/statuses/1644880255
gustaf 18y ago
Keeping 40% is a good number
- tutwabee 18y ago
  Unless 30% drop out during the second month.
- tptacek 18y ago
  It sounds like an especially sick high conversion rate when your feeders are CNN and the television network news.
- swombat 18y ago
  Not only that, but I have this sneaky suspicion that even though many users drop off in the first month, many of those same users end up coming back later. Most of the people I know who joined Twitter followed this pattern: 1) create an account, "give Twitter a try" 2) Forget about it for a couple of months 3) Get back to it under renewed pressure, start using it properly, and stay So the 1-month retention rate may well be irrelevant. What's the 3-6 months retention rate?
  - diN0bot 18y ago
    why do you think this? how many people do you know who did this (hooked on second or greater try) versus never got hooked?
    - swombat 18y ago
      I know about half a dozen people who have done that. Some of them seemed like hopeless cases, but they still turned it around.
      - warfangle 18y ago
        I did the same thing. So now you know one more! :)
    - jnovek 18y ago
      Adding to the anecdote: This is how I became a Twitter user. It's probably testable -- in fact, it sounds like an opportunity to pick up the Twitter API, which I've been meaning to do for some time now.
TomOfTTB 18y ago
I’m Twitter’s bigger detractor but this seems dubious to even me. People see the name Nielsen and think its gold because of their dominance in TV ratings. But the reality is they put their numbers behind a pay wall so they aren’t scrutinized by enough people to determine just how accurate they are. Combine that with the fact that their methodology doesn’t necessarily work at all when measuring web traffic and you have numbers that mean very little. With that said, I can see a decent amount of people dropping Twitter soon after trying it. Twitter’s usefulness isn’t immediately apparent which gives them a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to see why Twitter works for some people you have to be active on it and have a group of friends who are also active on it. But in order to get that you have to see why it’s useful.
chacha102 18y ago
As they put in their update, they aren't able to track 3rd party services. Considering 50% of all Twitter users use Twitter through 3rd party applications, that is probably a huge chunk. However, I wouldn't be suprised if Twitter doesn't have a good retention rate. Especially if you don't go into it with friends, starting out on Twitter is a little hard, and takes time to build up your stream of information and relationships with other people.
vaksel 18y ago
In reality the # is probably a lot higher. They just come back to see if they had any activity
numbchuckskills 18y ago
Answer = Oprah factor She did a terrible job using / teaching her audience about it, and all the moms at home give it a shot, don't get any value out of it, and quit. Not to single out just Oprah, celebrities in general have done a great job decreasing the value.
- mr_justin 18y ago
  It's funny you mention the "Oprah factor". I'd been feeling more and more skeptical about twitter the days leading up to the day Oprah showed up there. That was the peak of the celebrity wave, and it completely did me in. That night I deleted my twitter account. I still use the the API+Search to track what my close friends are saying, but have no interest in posting updates any longer.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    Ummm...what? What difference does it make how many celebrities are on there, especially if you're still using Search to track your friends?
    - mr_justin 18y ago
      I wasn't using search before, maybe I said that wrong. Before, I had an account and followed more people than I cared to keep up with (the you follow me, I follow you problem) then the celebrities came and really turned me off. So I deleted my account and now use specialized searches through the API to just show me what my close friends who use twitter are up to.
      - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
        Twitter has a pretty good specialized search for what your friends are up to: Twitter :) Why didn't you just unfollow the people you don't want to hear from?
        mr_justin 18y ago
tlrobinson 18y ago
Perhaps a better metric would be tweets. Should be easy to scrape everyone's first and last tweet. Though there's lots of spam accounts now too.
nir 18y ago
The Web has seen its share of hype, but I think Twitter is pushing it to new levels. Most people don't really need or even understand Twitter's functionality. Those who do are getting it from Facebook. But the best part is that the numbers actually reflect this. 6 million users in 3 years of constant hype is not a high number. (Just to put it in perspective: I once contracted for a company that produced a shopping toolbar. Nothing viral, no PR to speak of, nice but not amazing functionality. 3 million downloads in a year.) Any journalist could have deducted as much just looking at the user count. A slightly more serious one might actually use it for a while, and see how many of her followers are "SEO marketers", brands and other spammers. And yet the puff pieces continue. Personally, I think the best value we're getting from Twitter is in reminding us how incredibly poor, shiny object driven our media is, from Oprah all the way to Maureen Dowd.
- tptacek 18y ago
  I think you're nuts. I get a better newsfeed from BNO and CBS' Mark Knoller at the Capitol than I do from CNN. Show me how to do that on Facebook today. I also think it's disingenuous to suggest that people don't understand Twitter's functionality when the point you're actually trying to make is that you can't see why anyone would want it. But if you make that point, you have to deal with people coming back at you talking about talking to their customers on Twitter, promoting niche products on Twitter, arranging ad-hoc meetups when traveling on Twitter, getting direct feedback from their fans on Twitter, and it's much easier to pretend like 140 character broadcast messages are somehow tricky. I also think it's disingenuous to suggest that Twitter's N x 1MM users are the product of 3 years of constant hype, when 1.5-2 years of that hype was confined to the Web 2.0 trade echo chamber. CNN hasn't been hyping Twitter for 3 years.
  - nir 18y ago
    Here was a point-by-point rebuttal but I deleted it now since turning this to a Reddit-like argument is pointless. In any case, my problem is not with Twitter. I see it as a neat niche app - maybe you're right and it will be a huge app. Nobody can really know at this point. My disappointment is with its coverage. If the NY Times and CNN are this easily excited over a 6 million user website, what's their advantage over, say, Scoble? Are we rebooting the Web again? Watching them cover Twitter feels like watching middle aged parents trying to dress and act like their teenage children.
mahmud 18y ago
Naah, it's probably guys like me who are grabbing up names for all their projects, domains, family and friends, and waiting to see if we ever need them.
axod 18y ago
The facebook stream is just completely winning against twitter. It's usable. You don't have to worry about 140 characters, you can post vids, pics that actually show up inline, and comments show up under each post. For the "keep up with what friends are doing" use case, there's no comparison. Either twitter will need to adapt - and fast, or I suspect they'll die.
- whatusername 18y ago
  But twitter is still winning in the One-To-Many relationships.. I can't see what AplusK is up to on facebook.
  - axod 18y ago
    >> "But twitter is still winning in the One-To-Many relationships.. What sort of use case do you mean? IMHO facebook wins when it comes to updating your friends, general chit chat with your close contacts. The use case twitter is good for and facebook isn't yet afaik is 1 'celeb' updating thousands of followers.
    - diego 18y ago
      The point they (we) are trying to make is that Twitter is a news feed from people you consider interesting. You don't need to know them personally, they don't need to care who you are. Some may be your friends, some may be celebrities. Maybe all your friends on Facebook are really interesting. Most of us have some old classmate or relative who is a good person but constantly posts inane stuff to Facebook. My Facebook news feed is maybe 30% as interesting as Twitter's. I constantly unfollow boring people on Twitter and replace them by more interesting ones. You can't do that on Facebook.
      - axod 18y ago
        Click on [hide] next to a post... XXXXX has been hidden from your News Feed. In the future, you won't see posts from XXXXX
- 18y ago
wheels 18y ago
As pointed out in the update to the article, this isn't counting those who switch to using Twitter clients, which as the comment points out, accounts for about 70% of total tweets.
dant 18y ago
It's all about network effects. I think the hype is bad for Twitter, it makes people aware of the service before any of their friends are on there, so they try it, subscribe to Stephen Fry and Jeff Atwood and then give up. Me and a few of my friends in the UK .net development world are on there but we go days between tweets because that's what everyone else is doing. There's no conversation for me at the moment. At this point I'm just sitting on my user account and waiting for the network to become worth being a part of.
diN0bot 18y ago
"As discussed in the comments, Nielsen is only able to measure return visits to Twitter.com: how many people set up a desktop application like TweetDeck (TweetDeck reviews) and continue to Tweet, but never return to Twitter.com? " on the other hand, having to set up additional software just to make one's twitter stream sensical, is a large barrier to entry. i bet more people get turned away than take the next step.
ideamonk 18y ago
But the ones that use TwitterFox seldom quit :)
VinzO 18y ago
Yea I created an account, logged in, tried to add my first contact. I had the message that an error occured, retry later. I retried something like 3 times and I had a message that my account was blocked due to suspicious activities... Great for a first time... I never connected again.
tybris 18y ago
That's nothing, I quit before I even started using it.

What about API accesses? http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/statuses/1644880255 http://twitter.com/jorgeortiz85/statuses/1644880255

gustaf 18y ago

Keeping 40% is a good number

tutwabee 18y ago
Unless 30% drop out during the second month.
tptacek 18y ago
It sounds like an especially sick high conversion rate when your feeders are CNN and the television network news.
swombat 18y ago
Not only that, but I have this sneaky suspicion that even though many users drop off in the first month, many of those same users end up coming back later. Most of the people I know who joined Twitter followed this pattern: 1) create an account, "give Twitter a try" 2) Forget about it for a couple of months 3) Get back to it under renewed pressure, start using it properly, and stay So the 1-month retention rate may well be irrelevant. What's the 3-6 months retention rate?
- diN0bot 18y ago
  why do you think this? how many people do you know who did this (hooked on second or greater try) versus never got hooked?
  - swombat 18y ago
    I know about half a dozen people who have done that. Some of them seemed like hopeless cases, but they still turned it around.
    - warfangle 18y ago
      I did the same thing. So now you know one more! :)
  - jnovek 18y ago
    Adding to the anecdote: This is how I became a Twitter user. It's probably testable -- in fact, it sounds like an opportunity to pick up the Twitter API, which I've been meaning to do for some time now.

TomOfTTB 18y ago

I’m Twitter’s bigger detractor but this seems dubious to even me. People see the name Nielsen and think its gold because of their dominance in TV ratings. But the reality is they put their numbers behind a pay wall so they aren’t scrutinized by enough people to determine just how accurate they are. Combine that with the fact that their methodology doesn’t necessarily work at all when measuring web traffic and you have numbers that mean very little. With that said, I can see a decent amount of people dropping Twitter soon after trying it. Twitter’s usefulness isn’t immediately apparent which gives them a chicken-and-egg problem. In order to see why Twitter works for some people you have to be active on it and have a group of friends who are also active on it. But in order to get that you have to see why it’s useful.

chacha102 18y ago

As they put in their update, they aren't able to track 3rd party services. Considering 50% of all Twitter users use Twitter through 3rd party applications, that is probably a huge chunk. However, I wouldn't be suprised if Twitter doesn't have a good retention rate. Especially if you don't go into it with friends, starting out on Twitter is a little hard, and takes time to build up your stream of information and relationships with other people.

vaksel 18y ago

In reality the # is probably a lot higher. They just come back to see if they had any activity

numbchuckskills 18y ago

Answer = Oprah factor She did a terrible job using / teaching her audience about it, and all the moms at home give it a shot, don't get any value out of it, and quit. Not to single out just Oprah, celebrities in general have done a great job decreasing the value.

mr_justin 18y ago
It's funny you mention the "Oprah factor". I'd been feeling more and more skeptical about twitter the days leading up to the day Oprah showed up there. That was the peak of the celebrity wave, and it completely did me in. That night I deleted my twitter account. I still use the the API+Search to track what my close friends are saying, but have no interest in posting updates any longer.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  Ummm...what? What difference does it make how many celebrities are on there, especially if you're still using Search to track your friends?
  - mr_justin 18y ago
    I wasn't using search before, maybe I said that wrong. Before, I had an account and followed more people than I cared to keep up with (the you follow me, I follow you problem) then the celebrities came and really turned me off. So I deleted my account and now use specialized searches through the API to just show me what my close friends who use twitter are up to.
    - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
      Twitter has a pretty good specialized search for what your friends are up to: Twitter :) Why didn't you just unfollow the people you don't want to hear from?
      - mr_justin 18y ago

tlrobinson 18y ago

Perhaps a better metric would be tweets. Should be easy to scrape everyone's first and last tweet. Though there's lots of spam accounts now too.

nir 18y ago

The Web has seen its share of hype, but I think Twitter is pushing it to new levels. Most people don't really need or even understand Twitter's functionality. Those who do are getting it from Facebook. But the best part is that the numbers actually reflect this. 6 million users in 3 years of constant hype is not a high number. (Just to put it in perspective: I once contracted for a company that produced a shopping toolbar. Nothing viral, no PR to speak of, nice but not amazing functionality. 3 million downloads in a year.) Any journalist could have deducted as much just looking at the user count. A slightly more serious one might actually use it for a while, and see how many of her followers are "SEO marketers", brands and other spammers. And yet the puff pieces continue. Personally, I think the best value we're getting from Twitter is in reminding us how incredibly poor, shiny object driven our media is, from Oprah all the way to Maureen Dowd.

tptacek 18y ago
I think you're nuts. I get a better newsfeed from BNO and CBS' Mark Knoller at the Capitol than I do from CNN. Show me how to do that on Facebook today. I also think it's disingenuous to suggest that people don't understand Twitter's functionality when the point you're actually trying to make is that you can't see why anyone would want it. But if you make that point, you have to deal with people coming back at you talking about talking to their customers on Twitter, promoting niche products on Twitter, arranging ad-hoc meetups when traveling on Twitter, getting direct feedback from their fans on Twitter, and it's much easier to pretend like 140 character broadcast messages are somehow tricky. I also think it's disingenuous to suggest that Twitter's N x 1MM users are the product of 3 years of constant hype, when 1.5-2 years of that hype was confined to the Web 2.0 trade echo chamber. CNN hasn't been hyping Twitter for 3 years.
- nir 18y ago
  Here was a point-by-point rebuttal but I deleted it now since turning this to a Reddit-like argument is pointless. In any case, my problem is not with Twitter. I see it as a neat niche app - maybe you're right and it will be a huge app. Nobody can really know at this point. My disappointment is with its coverage. If the NY Times and CNN are this easily excited over a 6 million user website, what's their advantage over, say, Scoble? Are we rebooting the Web again? Watching them cover Twitter feels like watching middle aged parents trying to dress and act like their teenage children.

mahmud 18y ago

Naah, it's probably guys like me who are grabbing up names for all their projects, domains, family and friends, and waiting to see if we ever need them.

axod 18y ago

The facebook stream is just completely winning against twitter. It's usable. You don't have to worry about 140 characters, you can post vids, pics that actually show up inline, and comments show up under each post. For the "keep up with what friends are doing" use case, there's no comparison. Either twitter will need to adapt - and fast, or I suspect they'll die.

whatusername 18y ago
But twitter is still winning in the One-To-Many relationships.. I can't see what AplusK is up to on facebook.
- axod 18y ago
  >> "But twitter is still winning in the One-To-Many relationships.. What sort of use case do you mean? IMHO facebook wins when it comes to updating your friends, general chit chat with your close contacts. The use case twitter is good for and facebook isn't yet afaik is 1 'celeb' updating thousands of followers.
  - diego 18y ago
    The point they (we) are trying to make is that Twitter is a news feed from people you consider interesting. You don't need to know them personally, they don't need to care who you are. Some may be your friends, some may be celebrities. Maybe all your friends on Facebook are really interesting. Most of us have some old classmate or relative who is a good person but constantly posts inane stuff to Facebook. My Facebook news feed is maybe 30% as interesting as Twitter's. I constantly unfollow boring people on Twitter and replace them by more interesting ones. You can't do that on Facebook.
    - axod 18y ago
      Click on [hide] next to a post... XXXXX has been hidden from your News Feed. In the future, you won't see posts from XXXXX
18y ago

wheels 18y ago

As pointed out in the update to the article, this isn't counting those who switch to using Twitter clients, which as the comment points out, accounts for about 70% of total tweets.

dant 18y ago

It's all about network effects. I think the hype is bad for Twitter, it makes people aware of the service before any of their friends are on there, so they try it, subscribe to Stephen Fry and Jeff Atwood and then give up. Me and a few of my friends in the UK .net development world are on there but we go days between tweets because that's what everyone else is doing. There's no conversation for me at the moment. At this point I'm just sitting on my user account and waiting for the network to become worth being a part of.

diN0bot 18y ago

"As discussed in the comments, Nielsen is only able to measure return visits to Twitter.com: how many people set up a desktop application like TweetDeck (TweetDeck reviews) and continue to Tweet, but never return to Twitter.com? " on the other hand, having to set up additional software just to make one's twitter stream sensical, is a large barrier to entry. i bet more people get turned away than take the next step.

ideamonk 18y ago

But the ones that use TwitterFox seldom quit :)

VinzO 18y ago

Yea I created an account, logged in, tried to add my first contact. I had the message that an error occured, retry later. I retried something like 3 times and I had a message that my account was blocked due to suspicious activities... Great for a first time... I never connected again.

tybris 18y ago

That's nothing, I quit before I even started using it.