Twitter sending over 20,000 people a month to Mahalo.com

People have told me I'm crazy for wanting to give one of my friends on Twitter a Macbook Air if I become the #1 user (i'm essentially tied for #2 behind Obama). Well, based on the amount of traffic Twitter is sending to Mahalo.com I don't think so. It's not huge traffic, but as you can see in March Twitter sent over 10,000 people to Mahalo and this month we're on track to have--wait for it--20,000 folks visit Mahalo from Twitter.

In the past six months ~45,000 people have visited Mahalo from Twitter. If the 20,000 number is sustainable 250,000 folks will visit Mahalo from Twitter over the next year. Most of these folks are coming from my personal account (I'm think half).

250,000 visitors at .01 each is $2,500 in value. At .05 each (what StumbleUpon charges) it would cost $12,500. MacBook Air = $1,700.

Twitter is going to be huge. Folks have no idea how huge right now. Still working on getting on the board of twitter--not sure if they need me. :-)

Apr 16th 2008 2:49PM
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1. I wrote a post a few weeks ago how Twitter was my new search engine. It's very, very true.

Posted at 3:03PM on Apr 16th 2008 by Douglas Karr

2. Keep in mind that that is just traffic from twitter.com. That doesn't include all the page requests from all the twitter clients out there. You number is likely much larger as I don't know anyone who uses the web interface anymore.

-Joe

Posted at 3:04PM on Apr 16th 2008 by Joe Pruitt

3. I personally wouldn't have visited Mahalo if it weren't for all the Twittering. So there you go.

Posted at 3:48PM on Apr 16th 2008 by jm

4. FYI folks we are generating some of this traffic by using twitterfeed (http://www.twitterfeed.com), check it out.

Posted at 4:02PM on Apr 16th 2008 by sean percival

5. That's pretty good traffic! While our site has not been around going back to July, since September, your Twitter traffic is 25% greater than what we get from Yahoo. And Yahoo is our #3 referrer since we've launched (though it is but 1/10th of what Google sent us in that time, #2 is direct traffic). The Twitter traffic is definitely impressive.

You've lost me in one regard though: you've written fairly extensively about Mahalo NOT being aimed at the early adopter crowd. Though I totally get it that it's good for buzz and promotion and gets visibility with a lot of technology writers, I don't really understand the time focus you put on it unless your Google/Yahoo/direct traffic is in the neighborhood of 100-1000 times more than your Twitter traffic. In which case -- have fun!!

However, I think I'm missing something you may not have shared yet. You may be one of the biggest experiments ever in social marketing. I'm not asking you to divulge Mahalo's full traffic stats, but if you can talk about the "Twitter effect" outside just the direct traffic from Twitter and how it impacts things via getting the Jason Nation to digg and comment up youtube posts,etc., it would be very educational, and not just for me...

Posted at 4:42PM on Apr 16th 2008 by Robert Seidman

6. I have no objection to automated tweets, nor do I have any objection to using Twitter as a method of "getting the word out" - or marketing, even.

"Hey, check this out *link* - it's a *description*" is social, and as long as the content remains social - it's legitimate use of Twitter.

To be effective at all, just like everything else these days, you have to be engaged in the conversation. No one will click your links if you don't have the social gravitas generated by participating in the conversation.

Posted at 5:08PM on Apr 16th 2008 by Eric Martindale

7. Wish I had thought of it

I do want you to prove your Jason though

Not sure how you do that

I am the real ZuDfunck, but I don't know how I prove that, so I guess you are who yo say you are...

Posted at 9:55PM on Apr 16th 2008 by ZuDfunck

8. 0,05 is a cpm of $ 50 but stumbleupon doesn't charge its advertisers on a cpm basis.
The users discover the web in a fun way by clicking on stumbleupon in the toolbar in the browser so basically the user gets to see the advertisers site.
It's a totally different approach so I don't think you should use that number.
Unless of course ...

Mahalo has a toolbar.

Jason, you just gave as a little peek into what's next.

Posted at 6:15AM on Apr 17th 2008 by ds

9. Probably because you have 20,000 followers?

Posted at 12:28PM on Apr 17th 2008 by Russell

10. So basically you tricked "The Jason Nation"... Macbook Air if if if and if.

nice.

Posted at 12:59PM on Apr 17th 2008 by Mark

11. "To be effective at all, just like everything else these days, you have to be engaged in the conversation. No one will click your links if you don't have the social gravitas generated by participating in the conversation".

I don't agree. If you set up an Twitterfeed, and make the thing upfront about being an RSS feed, it doesn't need to be engaged. Everything has its place - but IMHO an RSS feed isn't going to be *as* effective as a person.

I like (and I use) the Guardian's tech feed (RSS to Twitter), but I prefer Jemima Kiss because she's real.
I'd be interested to know how their stats compare; Jemima vs the tech feed - but I think I can guess...

For now, we've just started to use Twitterfeed (as in, two days ago) and it's still a little temperamental - too early to tell how it'll affect our stats overall, but RSS already accounts for quite a hefty chunk of visitors.

Posted at 1:05PM on Apr 17th 2008 by Ruth Harper

12. Hey Jason (or whoever has an answer), how have the recent Twitter issues affected this traffic? Has Twitter finally resolved their problems with tweets not showing up in the timeline or are you still noticing lower traffic?

Posted at 7:00PM on Apr 25th 2008 by Will Johnston

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