Q: How many Twitter accounts? A: About 480,000,000.

Twitter Stats

Twitter Accounts

Active Accounts

Sleeper Accounts

Dormant Accounts

Dead Accounts

Suspended Accounts

Protected Accounts

Verified Accounts

Timezones

Mysteriously Unnamed

WhisThis.com - Estimating Twitter usage since 2010

WhisThis.com has been making use of the excellent Twitter API for some years and in that time we've received huge amounts of data from Twitter as a by-product of the calls we've made. This data is usually discarded but recently we took some time out to investigate potential gold-mine there is in these superfluous bits and bytes.

We've also noticed that many questions are posed asking just how many people use Twitter and how many are 'active' users. Knowing the answers to these questions is becoming more and more important as businesses look to use Twitter as a serious channel to promote their products and to engage with customers.

And so on this page you'll find our estimates, and we can only stress these are estimates, on Twitter usage and accounts. Our statistics are updated hourly so please do visit this page regularly to see what is happening right now on Twitter.

Twitter was created way back on 21st March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched on July 15th that year. As the chart below shows, nothing much happened until 2007 and the first million accounts created the critical mass to drive Twitter into the public conscience, at least in the conscience of the early adopters. It is acknowledged that the SXSW conference of 2007 was the driver behind this uptake.

The Mumbai attacks of 2008 were another pivotal event for Twitter when news teams across the globe reported Tweets from people on the ground in Mumbai giving real-time status updates of the unfolding massacre. The New York Times, in July 2009, described the event as "what may be the most well-documented terrorist attack anywhere".

In 2009 Twitter's growth accelerated. This was the year of the Iranian election protests where, as in Mumbai, people on the streets were providing the world with a real-time report of what was happening. Barracuda Labs also report late 2008 to the first months of 2009 as Twitter's 'Red Carpet' Era: "the period of time during which a handful of 'celebrities' - including 27 of the top 50 and 48 of the top 100 most followed Twitter users - joined".

By 2010 Twitter was truly mainstream and was a global success. It was so ubiquitous in 2011 that it is credited by some as driving the Arab Spring uprisings, and currently the growth of accounts shows no signs of slowing down.

The next chart shows the percentage of Twitter accounts created each year since the launch back in 2006. The chart clearly shows Twitter really took off in 2009 and growth continues strongly today.

Based on our analysis there are 0 accounts created each day, that's 0 every second! The most recently created Twitter account we have tracked is fahadbahi which was created at Mon Mar 19 11:27:11 +0000 2012.

We believe that our method of analysing Twitter account data is providing information that is reliable and accurate. The Twitter Account Growth chart shows that by the end of 2010 there were just over 200 million Twitter accounts. This aligns well with various public statements made by Twitter and other observers, e.g. Web Analytics World stated on 21st December 2010: "Dec 2010: Facebook almost 600 million users and Twitter 200 million".

This means that we have confidence in the accuracy of the various reports and charts we present on this page. However, none of these have been validated or acknowledge by Twitter and so you make any decisions based on these data at your own risk.

The number of active Twitter accounts is the real measure of Twitter usage. We took guidance from the 2009 Barracuda Networks study and tweaked their definition of an active account ever so slightly. We define an active account as one that has at least 10 friends, has at least 10 followers, has tweeted at least 10 times and, crucially, has tweeted in the past four weeks. This will weed out the previously active accounts by only recognising those that have a footprint on Twitter and have tweeted in recent times.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created each year that we believe are active accounts. The chart correlates inversely with Twitter account growth as we see that the early adopters are still actively engaged and getting value from Twitter. Of the accounts created at the time of the Twitter boom of 2009, and since then, we see that they are the least active - this is to be expected as many people will have signed up, taken a look around, and then moved on to something else. However the level of activity remains quite steady over recent years so we can assume that Twitter has matured and is now used as a valid channel for business use and so people are engaged and have a reason to stay around.

Based on our analysis only 9% of Twitter accounts - around 43,200,000 - are active.

A sleeper account is quite easy to define. Sleeper accounts are those Twitter accounts that are created and then do nothing. Nothing at all. They don't tweet, they don't follow other accounts and, because they don't show on the radar, nobody follows them. This makes them quite an odd bunch of accounts. Some of the accounts are genuinely holding place names for future marketing programmes, others are simply to stop squatting on certain accounts so as to fend of impersonation cases in the future. But most are accounts that are created... and then never used. How bizarre.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created each year that exist as sleeper accounts. As Twitter has moved into the mainstream it is to be expected that many people will have created accounts and then not been inclined to engaged - perhaps because they don't 'get' what Twitter is about. And, as already stated, many individuals and organisations will be creating accounts to register names without a plan to use them today, but maybe tomorrow. This trend of more sleeper accounts in recent times reflects this.

Based on our analysis 22.5% of Twitter accounts - around 108,000,000 - are sleeping.

Dormant Twitter accounts, by our definition, are those accounts that were active, i.e. have at least 10 friends, at least 10 followers and has tweeted at least 10 times and has tweeted in the last six months but hasn't tweeted for over four weeks.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created each year that exist as dormant accounts. We'll class these accounts as ones that people might be using but haven't had the time recently to be on Twitter, perhaps taking a short break.

Based on our analysis 2.7% of Twitter accounts - around 12,960,000 - are dormant.

Dead Twitter accounts are those that were once active, see the definition above, but haven't tweeted for over six months. We don't know if the accounts are accessed and perhaps the account owner is 'watching' tweets but we do know that they have moved from being relatively active to displaying a flat line of engagement. We'll class these as dead accounts, I expect the initial fun and intrigue of Twitter has worn off and the account has been forgotten about and won't be used again. It is an ex-account, a dead account.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created each year that exist as dead accounts.

Based on our analysis 3.9% of Twitter accounts - around 18,720,000 - are dead.

Suspended Twitter accounts are generally those that have been locked out by Twitter administrators due to a contravention of the Twitter Terms of Service or the Twitter Rules. We would expect that the majority of the suspensions are due to spam in its various forms. Like any successful on-line service the spammers won't be far behind once they realise there is an audience for their work and Twitter is no different.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created in any particular year that have been suspended. Note that the year indicates when the account was created, not the year in which the account was suspended. It is quite clear that as Twitter became mainstream around 2009 the number of suspended accounts started to grow - as the spammers moved in. It is interesting to note that the number of suspended accounts since then has remained relatively constant, maybe indicating a steady population of spammers who continue to abuse the system and get found out.

Based on our analysis 9.3% of Twitter accounts - around 44,640,000 - are suspended.

To fight back against spammers and to provide a level of privacy Twitter introduced the ability for accounts to be protected. You can find out more about protected accounts on the relevant Twitter support page.

The chart shows the percentage of accounts created in any particular year that are now protected. As with the suspended accounts chart the year indicates when the account was created, not when it was made protected. It is interesting to note that the older Twitter accounts are the ones that take up protection. Perhaps this is because they were around when Twitter went mainstream and the protection was applied in response to the ramp up of spam. The early adopters with the older accounts may also be more technically inclined to modify default settings whereas new users, who are looking to see what all the fuss about Twitter is about, are less inclined to modify their account if they are only passing through.

Based on our analysis 6.1% of Twitter accounts - around 29,280,000 - are protected.

Verified Twitter accounts were introduce mid way through 2009 in response to the rising number of cases of impersonations of individuals and organisations. This was inevitable as Twitter's popularity grew and became a valuable tool for celebrities and companies to keep in direct contact with their fans and customers.

The number of verified accounts is growing, yet is a tiny proportion of all Twitter accounts. We know this because it is one of the publicly available account statistics direct from Twitter via the @verified account. Take a look at the accounts that @verified follows and find out exactly how many verified accounts there are (27,706 when we last checked) out of the 480,000,000 accounts that we believe exist.

We reckon that 26.3% of Twitter accounts have associated timezones. Is Twitter a truly global phenomenon or is it strictly restricted to the developed world? Let's take a look at where the majority of Twitter accounts are registered, the top 10 timezones, and also where in the world Twitter has the smallest footprint. Remember, these are TIMEZONES and not individual countries.

Looking through our data we found that there are 1695 Mysteriously Unnamed accounts. This was quite a mystery to us, we were wondering where these accounts were from. They appear with Twitter IDs but no associated screen name, the only clue is the name being given as 'Mysteriously Unnamed'.

Some on-line digging showed that these accounts are known and acknowledged by Twitter as raised via issue 209 on the Twitter API issue tracker. Here you will find our list of Mysteriously Unnamed Twitter accounts.