Twitter Tanks. World Goes Haywire.

By Jamie Turner, Founder, 60 Second Marketer

What happens when Twitter goes down for a little under an hour? The world goes haywire. Why? Because many of the 500 million people who use Twitter have become addicted to it and, more importantly, because publishers, marketers and self-promoters lose out financially.

Twitter generates about $300 million in revenue from its advertising programs. Most of that comes from promoted Tweets like the one below.

Image courtesy of TutorialBlog.org

When Twitter goes down, Tweets carrying marketing messages (e.g., links to landing pages, promoted Tweets, etc.) are stuck with no hope of reaching “viral escape velocity.” This can be problematic for small, medium and large businesses alike.

According to VentureBeat, Ray Wang of Constellation Research conducted a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what Twitter downtime costs. Wang came up with as much as $25 million a minute, based on 25 percent of 100 million Twitter users in a business setting making $125,000 per year.

Here were his assumptions:

Twitter has 500 million users
Let’s say 100 million are business users
Let’s use an average salary of 125k (blended rate) over 124,800 minutes
(assuming a 40 hour work week/year)
Let’s say an outage means we lose about $1/person/minute
Let’s say 25% of that 100M are online during the work hour doing real work during an outage.

VentureBeat was quick to point out that Mr. Wang’s computation is likely on the high side, but the point remains the same — when Twitter tanks, the world goes haywire. That said, the world probably gets a lot more work done during that time, too.

Want to learn more about using Twitter and other tools to grow your business? Check out “How to Get Discovered on the Internet” on the 60 Second Marketer blog.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Founder of the 60 Second Marketer and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.