Less than 1% of New York Times readers are True Users
A new study from Barracuda Labs points out that “Only 21 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users”. This set off a wave of media attention about how few Twitter users are active. One of the criteria of being a True User for the study is that the user’s posted over 10 pieces of content.
I’ve used this same criterion to analyze the True Userbase of the New York Times. They’ve got a little more than 1,000 journalists, let’s say 3,000 free lancers, and maybe 5,000 folks who send them over 10 letters to the editor or web comments a year. So that’s about 10,000 True Users compared to 17 million monthly unique users (according to their media kit) who just read and maybe post comments one or twice. That means only .059% of NYT’s users are True Users.
My analysis might seem absurd unless you remember what world we’re coming from. Twitter’s the most successful service at getting lots of people to share their writing publicly (Facebook has many more users, but most of the sharing’s private). Before Twitter blogs were most successful at this, but I doubt over 20% of people who read blogs were inspired to write a blog regularly. Twitter still has many short comings, but why criticize it for how much further it has to go in beating a record? The same data could have easily had this tag line: “Twitter convinces a fifth of the people who try it to write updates regularly.”
