According to its about page, Twitter claims that as of September 2010, the service has 175 million registered users. But “registered users” is a funny term, which actually means the number of registered accounts, which technically do not have to be active in order to exist.
Seems like the company has no interest in disclosing the number of ’real’ (active) users, but fortunately you won’t be guessing forever because Business Insider know someone with full access to Twitter’s API. Even more fortunate, this person took it upon himself to have an engineer write up some code and actually count the real number of users on Twitter.
Using data that is currently only one month old, the source found that there are 119 million Twitter accounts following at least one account and there are 85 million accounts with at least one follower. With these numbers, Twitter’s 175 million figure, and a bit of math, one can see that there are 56 million accounts that aren’t following any other accounts and 90 million accounts without any followers.
Let’s say an active Twitter user is someone who follows at least 10 other accounts, how many such users are there?
The source’s API data shows that there are 56 million accounts on Twitter following 8 or more accounts. There are only 38 million following 16, and just 12 million following 64.
Those are some interesting figures, because they show us the microblogging site is much smaller than “175 million users”, the number Twitter might lead us to believe.
