Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has finally shared some highly-anticipated statistics that shed light on just how many active users the service has, as well as how those individuals are using Twitter.
Though Twitter has previously shared the total number of accounts in existence (over 200 million), until today it had kept mum on what fraction of those belonged to people that actively used the service.
At a "State of the Union" address held Thursday afternoon by Costolo at Twitter's headquarters, as well as via a blog post and Twitter's official @TwitterGlobalPR account, Twitter announced that it has over 100 million active users worldwide, half of whom log in daily and 40 percent of whom have not tweeted in the last month. Twitter defines an "active user" as "anyone who logs into Twitter once a month," notes TechCrunch.
According to a post on Google+ by FT tech and media reporter Tim Bradshaw (via Twitter's Rachel Bremer), Twitter also revealed that it is now processing 230 million tweets a day, a number that has increased 110 percent since the start of the year.
There's still much more we'd like to know from Twitter. For example, how often, on average, do active users tweet each month? Some studies have suggested that the vast majority of tweets come from a small minority of users--is Twitter observing similar trends? What percentage of tweets come from the most active Twitter users? How long do people spend on the site each month, on average?
It'll be interesting to see how these numbers change as Twitter introduces more advertising into users' streams, a necessary move to monetize the service that has some up in arms. TechCrunch writes that Costolo offered an update on what to expect as far as ads:
Costolo confirmed that Twitter is in the process of rolling out Promoted Tweets in the stream to everyone — whether you’re following a particular advertiser or not. And that doesn’t just mean on Twitter.com (where this roll-out is starting), these Promoted Tweets will be going everywhere Tweets flow, Costolo said. Yes, that means not only Twitter’s own mobile apps, but third-party services as well.
Check out a blog post from Twitter for more stats, as well as the slideshow below, featuring key tweets from @TwitterGlobalPR: