Someone saying their service has 10 million registered users doesn’t really mean anything. What matters is the number of users that use the service. Of course the definition of “use” can be as broadly or narrowly defined as someone wants. Let’s talk about Twitter. Twitter says they have 175 million registered users. The people at Business Insider worked with someone they knew that had full access to Twitter’s API. This person wrote code to calculate and break down the number Twitter users into groups based the number of people they were following and the number of users that followed them. That doesn’t really help us determine the number of “active” users but you can arrive at some conclusions based on whether or not you consider someone being active if they aren’t following or being followed by anyone.
The anonymous source used the collected data to come up with the following stats using the 175 million user population size:
- 119 million Twitter accounts followed one or more other users
- 85 million Twitter accounts had one or more users following them
So…if we take those number from the 175 million accounts we get this:
- 56 million Twitter accounts follow zero users
- 90 million Twitter accounts had zero users following them
Where do all those dead birds go?
[via: Business Insider]
