Finance Matters

Archive for February 22nd, 2010

A nice milestone for Twitter: It has now passed 50 million tweets per day, up from about 2.5 million per day at the beginning of last year.

This is one of Twitter’s most important metrics, so it’s a good thing that it’s still growing rapidly. Because Twitter is a distributed service all over the Web, on desktop clients, mobile apps, etc., “unique visitors” to Twitter.com has always been a somewhat flawed growth metric. (Though it’s obviously important for Twitter’s user base to continue growing, too.)

Here’s Twitter’s blog post on the achievement, posted by analytics staffer Kevin Weil:

As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we’ve grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there’s search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We’ll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

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See Also:

• US Skier Trashes NBC’s Olympics Coverage On Twitter — And It Gets Automatically Posted To NBC’s Web Site
• Please Rob Me: A Twitter Feed Dedicated To Telling The World When You’re Not Home
• Nearly 75 Million People Visited Twitter’s Site In January

Heading out of New York City this evening to New Jersey?

Be careful.

Due to “emergency construction” of an unspecific nature, the Lincoln Tunnel outbound is shut down, according to 1010Wins. (via BobbyMacReuters)

Good luck.

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See Also:

• Why The Lessons Of New York City’s Debt Crisis Won’t Help Greece
• The New York Times Buried The Bombshell Of Paterson Hiring His Ex-Girlfriend For Key Policy Spot Then Lying About It
• New York Fed: The Economies Of New York, New Jersey, And Connecticut Are Shrinking Again

Amazon has been handing out its Kindle DX reader to a bunch of university students, including those at CEO Jeff Bezo’s alma mater, Princeton. They want to hear feedback about whether the Kindle could eventually replace print textbooks.

Eric Engelman at TechFlash reports that Princeton has given its assessment. The results?

While the DX earned praise for its battery life, portability and legibility, students and faculty took issue with the device’s ability to highlight and annotate text, its folder structure and navigation controls.

Well, Bezos and his Amazon crew will have to get editing for their next Kindle edition, which will also have to be reading-friendly for blind people.

We wonder if Steve Jobs will hand out some iPads at Reed College in Portland, Ore., where he attended until he dropped out during the first 6 months.

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See Also:

• Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers
• Steve Jobs Says Book Publishers Hate Amazon’s Kindle
• Apple iPad Won’t Kill The Amazon Kindle

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate’s newest member says he will break ranks Monday with fellow Republicans and support a Democratic jobs bill in an important procedural vote.

The vote of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown gets Democrats closer to the 60 they would need to end debate and vote on passage of the bill. They need one more Republican vote because Democrat Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is expected to be absent because he is ill.

Brown says the bill is not perfect but he will support it. Brown was elected last month to fill the seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy. His election deprived Democrats of the 60 votes needed to end filibusters.

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See Also:

• Rosenberg: This Is A Houdini Recovery, And The Jobs Data Is Way Worse Than Official Numbers
• And Now The Jobs Bill Is In Trouble Too
• PROMISES, PROMISES: Obama’s Jobs Bill Sounds Great But Won’t Create Jobs

If Walmart is actually serious about becoming a major player in streaming movies, it’s buying the wrong company. Specifically, instead of buying online video upstart Vudu, for a reported $100 million-plus, it should buy Netflix.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Vudu, which Walmart is now acquiring. Vudu is one of a handful of companies — including Apple, Amazon, etc. — that lets you rent or buy digital movies over the Internet. But no one uses it, so it’s selling out to Walmart.

Why would Walmart want Vudu? More recently, Vudu has focused on getting its Web video service built into consumer electronics devices, including those from Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, LG, and Vizio. (And because, according to MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, Walmart thinks its video compression technology is “something special.”)

The idea is that Walmart — which is selling many of these devices, such as TVs and Blu-ray players, to consumers — could keep its movie revenue intact as DVD sales and rentals gradually shift to digital. As a reader points out, Walmart already has good relationships with studios, which could potentially help it strike better streaming deals than its rivals.

The problem is that it’s just going to take way too long for Walmart and Vudu to make a major impact here on their own, and as a result, this deal will likely be a failure.

Unless Walmart has something up its sleeve — a MUCH better pricing model, tons of exclusive content, some amazing features, life-altering UI, etc. — there’s really no reason why it would take the lion’s share of the on-demand movie market in such a crowded field, starting from zero. Netflix’s lead isn’t insurmountable, and these are the early days of Internet movie streaming. But it’s still a lead that’s taken the better part of a decade to build up.

Netflix has an established customer base of 12 million subscribers, half of whom are already streaming movies. And it has better consumer electronics deals — including all three major videogame consoles. And a subscription model that is already profitable and can finance its transition to digital.

Sure, Netflix is a lot more expensive than Vudu. Its market cap is about $3.5 billion, and it’s trading at a relatively high 33 points/earnings ratio. But Walmart could easily get the deal done if it really wanted to.

Bottom line is that it’s already going to be a huge, lengthy challenge for digital companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to challenge the cable incumbents, which are the natural leaders in on-demand content. In the end, there will only be a few big winners here.

If Walmart were REALLY convinced that it needed to be a leader in this business, instead of throwing more than $100 million away on Vudu, it should have made the bigger bet and bought Netflix.

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See Also:

• Walmart Buying Vudu To Go After Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, Cable
• CHART OF THE DAY: Half Of Netflix Streaming Viewers Are Watching On Their TVs
• Netflix: Half Of Subscribers Stream Movies Online