Twitter's growth. Note the huge jump at the end--that's the Oprah effect.
(Credit: Hitwise)Twitter's much-publicized appearance on Oprah Winfrey's talk show last week did a real number for the microblogging tool's traffic, a report from Hitwise indicates.
On April 17, the day of the show--when CEO Evan Williams appeared on-air and Winfrey herself began Twittering--a whopping 37 percent of visits to the Twitter.com home page were new visitors. That's a high number even for the fast-growing Twitter. Keep in mind that many avid Twitter users rarely even visit the home page, instead relying on desktop- or mobile-based third-party applications, so the jump might not look quite as drastic if you factor all those in. But it's still high: Hitwise says that in comparison, recent counts of new Facebook visitors as a percentage of overall traffic are more like 5 percent.
There's nothing particularly surprising about this, as the "Oprah effect" has been known to propel books to the top of Amazon's bestseller list almost instantly. It's more surprising that Twitter's servers, once notoriously volatile, stayed on top of things for the most part.
But what's really going to be interesting is to see how many of these curious new visitors come back regularly.
(Credit:
Twitter)
Your first day on Twitter can be rough. Twittering's still a brand new thing to a lot of people, and a lot of people have Twitterfails. Nobody on Twitter on Friday, though, got as much attention as Oprah, who tweeted for the first time.
Sadly, her inaugural tweet was all in caps. Thankfully, Shaquille O'Neal was there to remind the talk show host that her caps were on. We'd like to congratulate Shaq for having Oprah's back. That's what Twitter friends do for each other.
Oprah Winfrey joined the Twitterverse on Friday morning.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Updated 11:33 a.m. PDT with new @Oprah follower statistics.
The official answer is in regarding Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams' teasing tweet Thursday about Friday being a "very big day": @Oprah.
Oprah issued her first tweet around 7:10 a.m. PDT Friday--the same day Williams and Twitter's top celebrity, Ashton Kutcher, will join her on the show.
"HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY," she said, in etiquette-trampling all-caps.
It's easy to roll your eyes at the Twitter hype. The 30-person company still doesn't have a business model. A Google advertising partnership or an acquisition would have been more exciting news for the tech crowd. But here's why the Oprah moment shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
Within about 15 minutes her first tweet, Oprah had more than 76,000 followers, with a hundred more arriving by the minute. Four hours later, she had more than 125,000.
She embodies an element of mainstream America and has sway over a vast audience. An Oprah endorsement makes it a lot easier for a start-up to legitimately argue it's broken out of its tech niche, or at least is breaking out of it.
Twitter will be the subject of discussion on the show, and Williams will be making an appearance, though wearing dirty socks, he said.
Vying with Oprah for Twitter celebrity du jour status is Ashton Kutcher, aka @aplusk, who on late Thursday became the first Twitter user to attract 1 million followers. He gave Oprah a hello tweet Friday morning, which given the breadth of his following, likely will accelerate the rate at which people sign up to follow TV's diva.
How deeply has YouTube seeped into our collective consciousness and commandeered our culture? Who better to answer that than Oprah Winfrey?
The talk show host on Tuesday is scheduled to interview YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, according to a story in Variety. The Hollywood trade publication reports that characters from popular YouTube videos will also be featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Sure, you techies understand YouTube's cultural significance, but there are still plenty of newbies in this country who need Oprah to boil it down.
Anybody that has ever seen Hurley or Chen speak in public will understand that the pair won't make for thrilling television. Who cares? They have always been a minor sideshow anyway. Their contribution was creating a digital stage for other people to perform on. Upon completing that, they were smart enough to get out of the way.
Still, at this point they deserve to take a few bows. Consider that in the two years since the site launched, their stage has emerged as a vital campaign stump for politicians. Warring countries have launched propaganda campaigns against one other from the site. University students at UC Berkeley log on to view class lectures. Law enforcement from all over the world has used YouTube to try to find missing persons or wanted criminals.
One macabre trend saw mobsters in Mexico taping themselves murdering rivals and then in an attempt to terrorize others, went to the site to post the grizzly scenes.
Celebrities caught on camera misbehaving have seen their careers derailed once the clips made YouTube's Most Popular section. And there's no overlooking the scores of talented singers, comedians and performers who appear on the site daily.
Love it or hate it, who could argue against the fact that YouTube has become a hurricane force in communication and is often the most compelling show on the Web?
Winfrey is apparently convinced. Variety reports that she is launching her own YouTube channel that will include backstage and preview material from her show.
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