The Twitter outage introduces the concept of whether anyone would really miss the service if it went away. Financial experts have argued that Twitter is not worth much even with its 30 million or so unique visitors, a number that varies wildly depending on the source. The press has carried stories over the last few months reporting that the service is growing 1,400%, 500%, and, in some cases, is barely growing at all. Ars Technica recently reviewed Twitter research done by HubSpot. The tech website reported that “HubSpot’s analysis of Twitter’s 4.5 million accounts revealed that 54.9 percent of users have never tweeted and 52.7 have no followers whatsoever.” Put more simply, many of the people who sign up for Twitter accounts never use them.
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It may be old fashioned to look at the value of a business based on whether it provides any real service to the people who are its “customers.” The best way to evaluate that may simply be to ask what would happen if Twitter suddenly went away. In the case of McDonald’s (MCD), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), or Wal-Mart (WMT) a sudden disappearance would be a really big problem for its customers.
If Twitter closes, or ceases to operate because its service is constantly interrupted, no one would be really affected.
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