Over the past few days we have seen lots of posts on the cost of running Twitter from such luminaries as Jason Calacanis, Paul Walsh, Marc Canter, Dave Winer , Fred Wilson and Allen Stern
Myself and my business partner Florian Seroussi both serious Twitter users have been knocking around figures for the past 24hrs and Florian had a Eureka moment today
“Never mind what Twitter Costs, what the cost of Twitter? ”
According to @missrogue and @fredericguarino there over 450.000 active users and 750.000 registered users on Twitter and with Twittown suggesting 340,000 accounts in July and a growth figure of 60,000 users per month you can settle on a rough 1 million users.
Jens Alfke over at Thought Palace suggested
“11,000 requests per second”
The figure that stands out to me is “…up to 11,000 requests per second”. Jesus Christ, that’s a lot. Where does that come from? Even assuming a million members who each post ten times a day, that’s only about 100 posts per second”
Some users like @Warzabidul say they are on Twitter 17 hours per day and with heavy users like Silicon Valley superstars Robert Scoble, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur , New York Video superstar Loren Feldman and Vonage founder Jeff Pulver keeping an incredibly strong presence on the site we suggest that the average user spends at least one hour per day Twittering.
Our figures suggests 27M minutes per day about 450,000 hours/days around 13.5M hours month of non productivity due to our obsession.
At a growing pattern of doubling it sizes every 6 weeks, we can expect twitter to cost 30M hours per month of productivity.
Our estimates for 2008 suggest @ a minimum lost productivity cost of $20/hour this will represent $300M/month so $900M for first quarter, $600M per month for 2nd quarter so $1.8B, $1.2b per month for 3rd quarter so $3.6b and $2.4b/month for 4th quarter so $7.2b.
In total Twitter should cost economy around $13.5b in 2008!! Isn’t that FB value?
Update- We excluded the costs of sending and recieving SMS’s that are likely coming from/to a corporate phone’s.
Thanks Dameon
2 comments:
awesome post... I just can't get over the fact that facebook status is the same thing! sooner or later, facebook will allow people to choose whether or not they want their facebook statuses to be public... if enough of the 58 million facebook users choose to have a public status page, then what is the advantage of twitter? Twitter needs to do something dramatically different in order to survive for the next few years...
Aydin Mirzaee
Highly entertaining. I understand this is a spoof: but I suspect that some employers are going to latch onto this sort of commentary - and the story about people wasting time on Facebook and not have a reasoned discussion about how networking really works these days. In my days working for others, in an office, those of us who were more effective actually spent quite a bit of time on the phone, chatting, or at lunch - i.e. building relationships, upon which deals stood or fell.
I suspect some employers in blocking access to social networking sites are going to undermine the effectiveness of a lot of their brighter employees, especially the younger ones - then let's see where the productivity deficits show up.
But thanks for the entertainment - amazing how you came up with that exact figure to match the FB "valuation"> :)
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