Hey Thoughty2 here. Twitter was started in 2006 by four internet entrepreneurs, and it
took 3 years to get to one billion tweets. However, today over one billion tweets are
sent every week. Here's some really interesting things you probably don't know about Twitter.
1. Twitter was actually created on a playground. The founding team members were at the top
of a slide in a playground in San Francisco, when Jack Dorsey said "I've got an idea so
simple that you don't even think about it - you just write."
2. At first glance it may seem that, unlike most websites, Twitter is advertisement free.
But that's not quite true, Twitter is a business, and it does make money through cleverly disguised
advertisements. Twitter has two main revenue streams, firstly Google and Bing pay Twitter
a handsome license fee so that they can include tweets in their realtime search results. And
secondly big brands such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Red Bull and many others pay Twitter for sponsored
tweets which appear in Twitter search results. Brands can also pay for "promoted trends"
which appear amongst the other naturally trending topics. The cost for a Promoted Trend in the
United States for one day is $200,000.
3. Twitter gave the city of Boston a promoted trend free of charge after the Boston Marathon
bombing in April 2013. The trend was #OneBoston.
4. But when it comes to profit, Twitter is very different the likes of Facebook, Google
and Apple. Because Twitter has never made a single dime of profit. In 2014 Twitter made
a net loss of $578 million. Which can be attributed to its rapid expansion and excruciatingly
high operating costs.
5. But why are Twitter's operating costs so high. Well, it has a lot to do with the fact
that 500 million tweets are sent every day. Which is an astonishing 6,000 tweets per second.
All those messages take an awful lot of processing power and storage.
6. A single day's worth of Twitter posts would fill a 10 million page book.
7. The person with the most followers on Twitter is Katy Perry who has 68 million followers.
Second is Justin Bieber and third is Barack Obama.
8. The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube, which has 50 million followers.
9. Twitter wasn't always called Twitter, and it didn't always have a bird as a mascot.
When it launched it was called Twttr and it looked like this. When it was being created
"Friendstalker" was also considered as a potential name.
10. Twitter later added it's famous blue bird as its mascot, who by the way is called Larry.
Named after basketball player, Larry Bird.
11. Twitter is responsible for starting the hashtag phenomenon. The first ever use of
the hashtag on Twitter was, #barcamp, posted by an open source software advocate Chris
Messina. Who thought it would be a good idea to use the hashtag to signify a group. Chris
was inspired by the hashtag's heavy use in IRC chatrooms. He is now referred to as "The
Hashtag Godfather".
12. We've all heard of a hashtag, but how about a cashtag? Cashtags are used on Twitter
by Wall Street tweeters interested in tracking the news around stocks.
13. Speaking of news, Twitter has become the de-facto source for global news. When something
big happens around the world news of it spreads on Twitter via hashtags faster than any other
news source in the world. Because of this Twitter is now the primary resource for the
majority of TV news stations.
14. Twitter is seen as the home of super fast, and often instantaneous communication. So
it may come as a surprise that between 2008 and 2010 to help keep the site online Twitter
had a "guy with a pager". The pager would rotate between four people who would constantly
monitor Twitter to check if it went offline. These days they're a bit more high tech and
use automated monitoring systems to keep the website online.
15. Twitter has 288 million active monthly users. 80% of whom access the service through
mobile devices.
16. In the early days of Twitter, they were thinking about introducing a "worship" button.
If you worshipped someone, you would get every single one of their messages, but the idea
was ditched.
17. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said any Twitter employee can launch any test to 1 percent
of users without any senior approvals.
18. The most retweeted tweet ever was by Ellen DeGeneres with her star-studded selfie tweet
at the 2014 Oscars. It got 3.4 million retweets.
19. Tweets containing hashtags receive two times the levels of engagement than those
without hashtags, yet only 24 percent of tweets actually contain hashtags.
20. Twitter is on Twitter, but Twitter is also on Facebook, and Facebook is also on
Twitter. Twitter is also on YouTube and YouTube is on Twitter.
21. There is a Twitter account called everyword that has manually tweeted every single word
in the English dictionary. The task took them 7 years to complete.
22. There is also Twitter account with the username SignOut that has only ever tweeted
once but has 1,435 followers. Why? Because, apparently some Twitter users think that they
can sign out of Twitter by following the account.
23. Visiting either Twittter.com (with an extra t) or Twiter.com (missing a t) will
both redirect you to the official website.
24. The average number of followers of all users on Twitter is 208.
25. The FBI has a dictionary of Twitter slang.
26. In order to promote diversity the official twitter account of Sweden is given to a new
random citizen every week to manage.
27. The Library of Congress is archiving every single tweet sent by an American citizen,
because they believe each tweet is an important part of the national narrative of American
history. Their database of tweets is over 150 terabytes and growing.
28. The CIA also reads up to 5 million tweets a day. They could be reading yours right now.
29. 44% of Twitter users have never sent a single Tweet. They just use the site for stalk
people.
30. A report found that over 50% of Justin Bieber's Twitter followers are fake.
31. According to the Vatican, you can reduce the time you spend in purgatory by following
the Pope on Twitter. That sounds legit.
32. And finally, Twitter may not yet be making a profit but it is worth $31 billion and is
the 8th most visited website on the internet. And financial analysts predict that Twitter
could finally become profitable by the end of 2015, so don't give up on the old bird
just yet. Thanks for the view, subscribe for more Thoughty2.