Twitter on the verge of going mainstream? Yeah right
By Nigel (Chief News Junkie)
According to CNET Twitter has just signed a term sheet for another $15 to $20 million in funding. It is one of those fantastic “huge audience growth now, figure out the business model later” plays. Sometimes they work out (Google), sometimes they don’t (IM) and sometimes it is just to early to say (Digg, Facebook, YouTube).
In commenting on the recent news Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy stated that Twitter was “on the verge of potentially going mainstream in a big way“. That’s a pretty strong prediction from a journalist and I follow a lot of them. However, where is the evidence that Twitter is even on the verge of hitting the mainstream in a small way. TechCrunch report that they have around 200,000 active users per week. Even among early adopter tech community Twitter isn’t that widely used.
One demographic of the population that it has reached almost complete acceptance (and in some instances road to Damascus type conversions) is among bloggers and journalists. The value of Twitter to that community for finding stories, breaking stories and marketing is huge. Definitely worth the effort of downloading the app, building the friend list, un-following the ’social spammers’ and the lost productivity of being distracted all day. For the mainstream it just doesn’t pass the cost/benefit test.
If you check out Twitterholic you will see that 20 of the top 25 Twitterers are part of the tech crowd. There are five who aren’t (Obama (1), HotDogsLadies (7), CNN (8), TastyBlogSnack (12) and Stephen Colbert (24)) although all of them are very popular with the tech crowd. Here is my prediction: In a year’s time the majority of the top 25 Twitterers will still be techies.
The market is here: Will the majority of the top 25 Twitterers be techies on May 2, 2009? Want to bet against?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Tags: mainstream, sarah lacy, twitter
