Nielsen: We’re Sticking With Our 60 Percent Twitter Quitter Number
by Peter Kafka
Posted on April 30, 2009 at 1:18 PM PT
Nielsen caused a stir this week by releasing data that showed that 60 percent of Twitter users stop using the much-hyped service after a month.
But a common criticism of Nielsen’s study–which I also raised–was that Nielsen was only measuring visits to Twitter.com and not Twitter use via third-party apps. Theoretically, it’s possible to be an avid Twitter user without ever visiting the service’s Web site more than once.
Point taken, says Nielsen, which says it reran its study to account for that. And… no change! From Nielsen’s blog:
“As an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others. The results verified our initial findings: about 60 percent of people on Twitter end up abandoning the service after a month.”
If you’re so inclined, you can argue that Nielsen is still missing a big swath of Twitter users because it seems to have ignored mobile apps, which is where a lot of Twittering occurs.
But I still think Nielsen’s numbers sound about right, both in methodology and conclusion. I think it’s entirely possible that the majority of people who try Twitter don’t end up sticking with it, and I think that people who do use Twitter on third-party apps still end up at the site once a month. I do.
