14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter's gloomy growth figures may finally be changing as the latest numbers for January show a decent pickup in new users from the previous month. In fact, compared with the previous six months or so, the eight-percent bump in unique visitors to Twitter.com is a very welcomed sign. With the recent influx of new users, Twitter can now boast 73.5 million users on the site alone. Considering that a big percentage of them prefer mobile or desktop clients and rarely use the site, its real user base should be significantly higher.
Coming from 65.2 million users in December, according to comScore numbers, the eight-percent bump looks pretty good, especially after the dreadful months Twitter has been having lately. Compared with the growth it saw a little less than a year ago, it is positively abysmal. Twitter, in fact, grew this past month by more users, eight million or so, than it had in total in January 2009, when it attracted about six million people.
Year over year, that's a 1,105-percent growth, huge even for a social-networking site. The best part is that this isn't even the biggest leap for the site, as the figure was even higher in the first half of 2009. Still, Twitter must be relieved to see some uptake in growth, though it has access to much accurate numbers, which may or may not be similar to what we, in the outside world, get.
Still, you'd think that, if they were too positive, Twitter would share them with the world and put an end to the increasing speculation around the site's real user numbers. Instead, all we get are vague statements like the ones from last month, when Twitter claimed it was seeing its biggest day ever. What exactly it was the 'biggest' in wasn't specified, though it was probably in terms of usage. [via TechCrunch]