Caterpillar Cowboy

tanya77:

inothernews:

Isn’t Nielsen too busy taking educated guesses at just how many people are watching TV to waste time on measuring how long people stay on fucking Twitter?

pearlsbeforeswine:soupsoup:brooklynmutt:

Media folk are tripping over each other these days to tell their audiences how cool they think Twitter is and how deeply they are into Twitter culture.

Maybe so. But here’s a fascinating fact from a new Nielsen survey: Three out of every five users who sign up for Twitter drop out by the second month. That is only a 40 percent retention rate — much lower than that for Facebook and MySpace.

It makes you wonder how satisfying users are really finding Twitter. Or, maybe the question is: How short are the attention spans of some of these users?

Here’s a link to the Nielsen study along with a nice graphic of the steep decline in second-month use:

fullnelson

Nielsen Wire

Re: ION comment-C’mon, we’re supposed to take the Nielsen ratings on anything seriously? They’ve provided nothing better than guestimates for years regarding Broadcast TV and now they’re attempting the same strategy for their version of metrics. If I’m wrong, then where’s the basis of their research? How many people did they track? Where is that listed in the “findings”?

I mean are they trying to wing it the same way they did the Broadcast TV “data” where they poll a few people and then ASSUME a larger percentage of the population is doing the same? I just feel that we have a real shot here of getting accurate numbers for advertisers and I want THAT to be what they can count on, not smoke and guestimates.

I’d also like to compare this metric to some sort of industry baseline. How does it compare to Facebook, for example? Otherwise, it’s not very meaningful, IMO.