Web Development Magazine

Is Twitter having troubles?

Recently TechCrunch published article about Twitter and it’s decreasing traffic. According to comScore (company that offers solutions for online audience measurement), in October Twitter USA traffic declined by 8%. It dopped from 20.9 millions to 19.2 milions unique visitors.

Fortunately Twitter CEO Evan Williams is aware of this trend and hopes that new cool features that are going (or already were) implemented will reverse this trend.

Twitter US traffic

From my perspective there are actually two theories why Twitter losses traffic.

First it’s possible that it is because of API. There are so many great tools and apps based on Twitter API that people are using API instead of going to Twitter website. But isn’t API the problem itself? Twitter earns a lot of cash from advertisers, if people are using API then obviously this ads won’t be shown to them, thus making Twitter loose money.

I heard some ideas that they might put ads into the tweets grabbed with API, but that would be most ridicolous solution i ever heard of. First, because API results would be inconsistent and second if tweet is only 140 characters long, then how long should the  ad be? 20 characters? And by the way, sending longer tweets is not an option.

My second theory is actually a nightmare for Twitter. It’s possible that Facebook is taking Twitter users over. If you think about it Twitter is all about talking (or tweeting), while Facebook provides more natural way of communication and interaction between users. They have apps, quizes and what not, so it’s natural that people prefer it.