Twitter Celebrates Reaching 100m Users
The chief executive of Twitter says the micro-blogging site now has 100 million active users.
Dick Costolo said the number of people who log on at least once a month has soared by 82% since the beginning of the year.
Half of its active users log on every day and a large proportion of them are accessing the service from their mobile phones.
Mr Costolo, speaking at a briefing at the firm’s headquarters in San Francisco, also revealed Twitter is preparing to expand its use of adverts to generate more revenue.
The company began showings ads in limited parts of the service in 2010, deliberately taking a cautious approach so as not to annoy users.
At present promotional tweets advertising firms like Starbucks have only appear on a user’s message screen if they have chosen to follow that particular company.
From now on, Mr Costolo said, users will also see tweets from companies they do not follow.
“It’s our firm belief that our advertising platform is the only revenue component that we need to have in the market in order to be a huge independent business,” he said.
Twitter, which enables users to post messages of up to 140 characters, has become one of the most popular online social networking sites along with Facebook and Zynga.
The company said it has 400 million unique visitors a month and five billion tweets are sent every month.
Last month the news that singer Beyonce was pregnant set a new Twitter record.
A staggering 8,868 tweets were sent per second after the singer announced she was expecting at the MTV video music awards.
