Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day
Almost since its inception, people have been doubting Twitter’s ability to engage with a mass audience. Despite some massively high profile celebrity users, there have been repeated criticisms of the site’s functionality and usefulness when compared to the likes of Facebook.
Despite all that, Twitter continues to defy predictions of its demise and today announced that it hit a new milestone: 50 million tweets in a single day.
That’s a pretty impressive statistic by any measure and suggests that Twitter is now firmly established in the social media sphere as a genuine player. The site is, in fact, so well established that savvy journalists now mine Twitter for opinion and on-the-ground reports of live events – as so aptly demonstrated by the use of the site by Iran’s Green Movement during last years protests over the elections there.
The critical test for the service’s owners must soon be on hand however. With the exponential growth curve, costs of hosting these millions of Tweets as well as the uncounted number of API calls and security updates means that investors will soon want to see a plan for Twitter that involves monetisation. Whether the site starts to carry targeted advertising, sponsored Tweets or other revenue streams, making a profitable return from a format which by it’s very nature is typically engaged with in very short bursts remains to be seen.
