Twitter Is At 250 Million Tweets Per Day, iOS 5 Integration Made Signups Increase 3x
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has just dropped some numbers at a dinner here at Web 2.0 Summit. Costolo revealed that the company has gone from 100 million tweets per day to 1/4 billion tweets per day — a billion tweets every 4-5 days, he said.
Context & Ripple Effects
The numbers Costolo disclosed at Web 2.0 Summit are the first public readout on what Apple's June decision to bake Twitter into iOS actually bought the company: a tripling of signup rate. That deal was framed at the time as handing Twitter distribution no rival could match, and this is the first hard evidence it converted into users rather than just placement.
The volume jump from 100 million to 250 million tweets per day lands on top of an audience that had already passed 200 million accounts by April 2011, when Twitter also noted 70% of its traffic was international. Business Insider's same-day pickup of the dinner remarks also pinned down what TechCrunch's writeup left implicit: Costolo confirmed an $8 billion valuation.
First-order effects
- Twitter's growth engine shifts decisively to OS-level distribution: with iOS 5 shipping to every new iPhone and iPad buyer, signup cost drops toward zero while rivals like Facebook must negotiate for equivalent placement or build their own devices.
- The t.co link-wrapping across all tweets and DMs gives Twitter engagement data on every shared URL, strengthening its pitch to advertisers just as the company is validating an $8 billion valuation.
Second-order effects
- Costolo's claim that Twitter leads Facebook 3-to-1 as the top social sharing integration in mobile apps puts pressure on Facebook to respond with its own deep OS deals — the Project Spartan HTML5 push being the obvious counter-move — and raises the price of platform partnerships across the app ecosystem.
- The Twittad settlement days earlier gave Twitter dominion over the word 'tweet', so every third-party client and analytics vendor riding this volume growth now operates inside a trademark Twitter can enforce.
Third-order effects
- If OS-integrated sharing becomes the default path to scale, social platforms stratify into those with native OS access and those paying for reach — making mobile operating systems the gatekeepers of social distribution, not the networks themselves.
- Costolo's stated commitment to staying simple rather than entering a feature race suggests Twitter intends to compete on ubiquity and speed of sharing, pushing differentiation toward the third-party developer ecosystem it simultaneously constrains through t.co and trademark control.
The trend: Mobile operating systems are becoming the primary distribution channel for social platforms, with Apple's integration choices capable of tripling a network's signup rate overnight.