Twitter has reached a significant milestone: 100 million active users (those who sign in at least once a month) converse or simply listen on the microblogging platform, and more than 50 million of those do so every day. In a blog post, Twitter released impressive, and sometimes surprising, statistics:
- Within weeks, Twitter will support 17 languages.
- More than 99 percent of America’s top 200 nonprofits are on Twitter.
- 40 percent of active users don’t actually tweet, but they are listening.
- 35 global heads of state use Twitter as their primary method of communicating with constituents.
- More than 40 percent of top global religious leaders are on Twitter, including the Dalai Lama and the Pope.
CEO Dick Costolo talked growth, revenue and improved infrastructure during a press conference yesterday. Twitter raised $200 million in funding last December and moved to a new data center and servers over the winter. This resulted in their capability to handle up to 8,900 tweets per second, a new record set two weeks ago when Beyonce’s pregnancy was revealed, without crashing and throwing out as many fail whales as they did last summer during the World Cup, at just 3,300 tweets per second.
They came up with another $400 million in G-series funding in July, and is set to close another $400 million to be used for existing shareholders who exercise their option to cash out. The company’s most recent valuation is an estimated $8 billion, but those hoping for an IPO won’t see one anytime soon.
On their plans for the near future, Costolo confirmed that Twitter does not intend to scale the data licensing business and will focus instead of advertising, which he believes is the only revenue stream Twitter needs at the moment. They will work on targeting specific user groups for advertisers and plan to share advertising revenue with third-party apps that display Promoted Tweets.