This guy says that Twitter is getting spikes up to 11,000 page requests per second.
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000608.html
That works out to a peak load of 950 million pageviews/day That is as much traffic as facebook did per day in Jan of this year. In Twitter’s case probably 99.9% of those pageviews are RSS, automated requests and status polling of some kind.
This company reminds me a lot of Youtube, lots of bandwidth and no way of monitizing it. Twitter is going to have a tough time covering 6 figure bandwidth costs if those numbers are even remotely correct. But at least for twitter they have traffic, and traffic gives you options, such as acquisition!
April 13, 2007 at 1:16 am |
blah.. free press…
April 13, 2007 at 1:17 am |
it is like one big IRC chat session… with one question.. and bunch of morons LOL
April 13, 2007 at 1:28 am |
I doubt its RSS using up the bandwidth, most feed readers only poll every hour.
Its most likely their web page widgets/badges etc.. in that respect its very much like Youtube was when 99.9% of their traffic was caused by embedded videos in other peoples pages.
April 13, 2007 at 1:31 am |
you’re forgetting the other bandwidth cost — sms terminations
April 13, 2007 at 1:46 am |
Besides having a totally gay name, I chock this site up as elitest, web 2.0, VC jack-off material which no one in the real world gives a damn about. That last part means this traffic can never be significantly monetized. And happily will never make money. I wouldn’t want to be the investor holding the twitter bag 2 years from now when the novelty wears off and they realize they are subsidising a few nerds who blog the minutia of boring lives rather than live them.
April 13, 2007 at 2:18 am |
all twitter needs to do is just play it cool for a while longer – get a little more established, and then ’soft-launch’ a premium sms charge – bingo buckets of cash
April 13, 2007 at 5:32 am |
[...] Twitter receiving 950 million pageviews/day? [...]
April 13, 2007 at 5:52 am |
According to this podcast (twitter talk starts at 15:20 minutes, SMS talk from 18:25 to 22:10) put out by their webhost, they probably make plenty enough off of the SMS traffic. I did not know about this cellular carrier revenue sharing till I heard this podcast. Also, there was an earlier podcast (15:55-30:20 is the relevant bit) by their webhost, when the CTO first explained the service to the CEO and some other techies and they ripped the service, although they’re probably singing a different tune by now. I will note that their bandwidth is probably a fraction of that used by video sites so I’m not sure why you’re worried about that.
April 13, 2007 at 11:42 am |
Twitter makes no money right now. They don’t make ANY monoey off SMS. It actually costs them money to send SMS messages. Around $40K a month on SMS alone.
April 13, 2007 at 8:17 pm |
Any source for this info, mike? I linked to my sources. Also, as mentioned in the podcast, you have to hit a certain threshold before revenue sharing begins. Perhaps they haven’t hit it yet but will someday soon? Although, I have to side with Marc that this is just one of those geek fads that will soon die out.
April 14, 2007 at 4:26 am |
mike is correct. In the U.S. no one but the big players (American Idol big) make money through revenue sharing. According to Evan Williams (the founder of Twitter) they are paying SMS fees in the five figure range per month.
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/04/02/calacaniscast-21-beta/
April 18, 2007 at 12:54 am |
there is money to be made, somewhere. but its most likely going to be commercial twitter pages like the one they just did for some fox tv show. like director commentaries every x minutes while you watch.
and yes they are losing like 50k a month on sms charges.
April 22, 2007 at 9:43 pm |
Basically Twitter is offsetting it’s mobile costs against advertsing. This is bizarre. It could use a long-number or premium system, and turn this into profit. – I just don’t get the gaping hole in the business model
Dan
http://www.freebiesms.co.uk
August 4, 2007 at 10:37 am |
[...] world talking 54. VentureBeat » Roundup: The Obama Valley, Twitter’s cash, Zonbu … 55. Twitter Business model. « The Paradigm Shift 56. Hightouch: Twitter driving blog traffic 57. Twitter – Blog Toplist 58. Twitter vs Jaiku traffic [...]
April 10, 2008 at 1:22 am |
…subsidising a few nerds who blog the minutia of boring lives rather than live them…
that’s what I thought when I first heard of twitter. Then we added tweets to our deployment system, as a dirt simple way of asynchronously notifying about a deployment (ie, without adding interuptions to the deployee or the interested party(s) waiting on a deployment)
then we realized twitter was a good way for developers to asynchronously indicate what they were working on and/or blocked by
we are nerds. we wait for the grid/mesh to be in place, so we have to care even less about financiers and other non-nerd subhumans.
April 21, 2008 at 11:23 am |
In his blogarticle “Twitter at the tipping point ” (19 Apr 08), ICT journalist Rory Cellan-Jones says he doesn’t think twitter can introduce a real business model. I strongly disagree.
link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/04/twitter_at_the_tipping_point.html
I’ve formulated my thoughts on this subjection over there.