Last year, Twitter came up with an estimation on something that technically is seemingly immeasurable.
With the active user base is currently sitting on around 320 million monthly active users, Twitter is also reaching more than 500 million people each month who are exposed to Twitter content but don’t ever actually log-in to the site. Take a look at the pie chart below.
That’s a big boost in active user figures. Twitter calculated that more than 125 million people visit their home page each month at the time but don’t log-in, while tweets also generate over 185 billion impressions each quarter through syndication (the tweets which are broadcast or embedded on other platforms). While those estimations may seem somewhat speculative, they do make some sense.
Much of Facebook’s information is locked away and only available to those who are logged in, which makes it easier for Facebook to track actual impressions. LinkedIn’s data is much the same as Facebook, but Twitter, on the other hand, is all public. The vast majority of tweet content is available for all to see, which is a core element of Twitter’s ‘global town square’ approach. But that openness and accessibility also, inevitably, makes it more difficult to track definitive numbers on reach and response. Could that equate to an additional audience of almost double their traceable user base? It’s hard to say, but there is definitely a wider audience there. When Twitter originally announced the number of ‘logged out’ users, Wall Street saw the wider potential, though that potential is reliant on Twitter actually being able to monetise this expanded audience in a meaningful way. And now, more than a year after the release of those initial figures, Twitter has detailed it’s plans to do just that. Twitter has detailed the way how it’s going to make money off of those non-logged in users – by targeting them with promoted content.
Still, how can you provide targeted ads to viewers who you have little to no data on? In Twitter’s case, by using the few reference points they do have available.
For example, Twitter may not know what a log-out viewer is interested in, which it can get from regular users by examining what they tweet, who they follow, location, etc. But what Twitter can determine from its logged-out audience is how they came to see Twitter content – a viewer, for instance, may do a search for ‘Steph Curry’ on Google then click on a tweet in the search results – Twitter can determine from this that that viewer may be interested in ad content related to that search term. If someone clicks on an embedded tweet, Twitter can track which website that viewer came from and target based on that.