Twitter – Is Andy Warhol Calling?

Andy Warhol, the incredibly quirky artist whose accomplishments, among others, was the design of the Campbell’s soup can, said that everyone would have 15 minutes of fame, then basically go dark.

Twitter, after having a huge rise in popularity over the last few months, is now suffering a large drop in measured usage in  the month from September to October, with the trend continuing through today. Is it possible that Twitter has given every inhabitant of the Earth their 15 minutes, and so its job done, is fading away?

A story on Maximum PC shows the facts, and asks some of the questions we might also be asking.

Maybe Miley Cyrus was on to something, or perhaps she started a trend. But whatever the reason, Twitter’s rapid rise appears to have to turned into a downward tumble, according to data provided to eMarketer by Nielsen.

We’re not talking about just a few Twitter users leaving the service. According to Nielsen, traffic to Twitter slid 27.8 percent between September and October, dropping from 26.2 million unique visitors to 18.9 million. Nielsen’s numbers were perhaps the most dramatic, but other research firms also noted a decline. According to comScore, unique visitors were down 8.1 percent in October, while Compete noted a more modest 2.1 percent drop.

No matter whose numbers you trust, the drop in traffic is concerning for one of the hottest services on the web. But are they telling the whole story?

“While it’s valuable to look at Twitter’s web traffic, the true picture won’t emerge until all the third-party traffic from mobile phones and API clients is accounted for,” wrote senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson on the eMarketer blog.

Edit: Nothing new here. These Twitter traffic numbers were released two weeks ago, as we reported here.

So, either Twitter is going away, and only the especially chatty will mourn its demise, or, and possibly better, Twitter might actually be used as a medium for information transfer that someone actually cares about. With the removal of tweets of what the typical user has had for breakfast, perhaps we can actually communicate in some meaningful way.

Hope springs eternal.

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History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes. Voltaire

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