Analysis of Linking Patterns on Twitter: Cligs scores well!

Summary

This post documents an analysis of 10.2 million tweets containing 2 million links. Those links were analyzed to understand which domains are most used. The analysis shows that:

• tinyurl.com is the most used domain name;
• cli.gs is the 18th most used domain name;
• Of the top 50 domains used in links, 18 are URL shortening services;
• Of the URL shortening services, Cligs is 10th most used.

As the owner of a URL shortening service here on Cligs, I’m very interested in the Twitter market, hence this analysis. I’m sharing the results because they are very interesting in their own right.

Note: A list of references is found at the end of this post.

Introduction

On December 22, a massive Twitter data scrape was released, with the blessing of Twitter, no less. How massive? Let’s look at some of the numbers:

• 10.2 million tweets…
• …from 8 million users…
• …containing 2 million links…
• …and 219 thousand hashtags.

And a lot more.

Of particular interest are the links data, handily extracted into a separate file. The file contained data for 2071291 links. These approximately 2.1 million links were analyzed to extract the domain name of the URL of the link. For example, for a link URL for http://cli.gs/abc123, the domain name is cli.gs.

The analysis counted the occurances of the domain names in the 2.1 million links. The domain names were then sorted by their occurance count in descending order. The top 50 domains were analyzed in detail.

Top 50 Domains Used on Twitter

First the data, which you can download as a PDF file at the end:

Domain	Count	URL Shortner?	Notes
tinyurl.com	1048240	Yes
is.gd	107093	Yes
twitpic.com	88871	No	Application to posts photos to Twitter.
bit.ly	67515	Yes
ff.im	40260	Yes	Automatic shortner for Friendfeed. Counted as a URL shortner because it doesn’t use the friendfeed.com domain name.
twurl.nl	37575	Yes
blip.fm	25658	No	Music app that posts to Twitter what you’re listening to.
bkite.com	24276	No	Location based social network.
snipurl.com	23562	Yes
ping.fm	17780	No	App to update social media sites.
snurl.com	12316	Yes
tr.im	12154	Yes
snipr.com	11933	Yes
loopt.us	8649	No	Mobile social compass thing.
budurl.com	7076	Yes
www.flickr.com	6248	No	Image sharing site.
twitter.com	5963	No	Ummm…
cli.gs	4840	Yes	Woohoo!
www.nicovideo.jp	3716	No	Looks like a Japanese video site
be-a-magpie.com	3609	No	Ad network for Twitter
movapic.com	3574	No	Looks like a Japanese image site
tiny.cc	3296	Yes
hellotxt.com	3281	No	App to update social media sites.
aweber.com	3103	No	Marketing tools
raptr.com	3054	No	Social platform for people who like to play and discover games
tgr.me	2877	Yes	Automatic shortner for Twitter Groups.
zi.ma	2877	Yes
flickr.com	2779	No	Image sharing site.
ad.vu	2684	Yes	Adjix alternative.
twittgroups.com	2605	No	Groups for Twitter
mrtweet.net	2549	No	Social graph analysis.
EzineArticles.com	2522	No	Article directory
qik.com	2506	No	Mobille video sharing
www.myspace.com	2479	No	Social network
www.last.fm	2475	No	Music app that posts to Twitter what you’re listening to.
activerain.com	2266	No	Real estate network
adjix.com	2243	Yes
www.desktoptopia.com	2227	No	Desktop background manager
f.hatena.ne.jp	2113	No	Looks like a Japanese image site
poprl.com	2087	Yes
www.squidoo.com	2060	No	Creates topic-specific pages
piurl.com	1972	Yes
ow.ly	1961	Yes	By Brightkit
www.ustream.tv	1864	No	Live streaming video
zz.gd	1710	Yes
www.blogtv.com	1697	No	Video sharing site
www.youtube.com	1662	No	Video sharing site
xrl.us	1621	Yes
vimeo.com	1599	No	Video sharing site
d.hatena.ne.jp	1589	No	Looks like a Japanese image site

Analysis of Top URL Shortners Used on Twitter

The top 18 URL shortners accounted for 1395892 links, or 67.4% of them. Some URL shortening services have multiple alternative domains their users can opt to use. If we group these sister domains and look at the URL shortners, the data looks as follows:

Grouped	Counts	As % of Shortners
tinyurl.com	1048240	75.09%
is.gd	107093	7.67%
bit.ly	67515	4.84%
snipurl.com, snurl.com, snipr.com	47811	3.43%
ff.im	40260	2.88%
twurl.nl	37575	2.69%
tr.im	12154	0.87%
budurl.com	7076	0.51%
ad.vu, adjix.com	4927	0.35%
cli.gs	4840	0.35%
tiny.cc	3296	0.24%
tgr.me	2877	0.21%
zi.ma	2877	0.21%
poprl.com	2087	0.15%
piurl.com	1972	0.14%
ow.ly	1961	0.14%
zz.gd	1710	0.12%
xrl.us	1621	0.12%

Or in a more graphical form:

Thoughts & Conclusions

• We have an absolute classic of a long-tail data set: The top 50 domains accounted for 1628666 links (78.6%). This is a very narrow head and a very long tail of domain usage.
• The tinyurl.com domain dominates, accounting for 75% of all URL shortening on Twitter. Thoughts about how much valuable traffic Twitter is simply throwing away by not owning on a postcard please.
• Cligs is the 10th most used on Twitter which is not bad for a one-man show in 3 months!
• Look at ff.im. That’s Friendfeed’s posting to Twitter mechanism. That’s a lot of posting going on there!
• Twitpic is much more popular than I thought it would be. It’s the top non-shortening service used in links, and number 3 overall in the link rankings. I already had great respect for the Twitpic guy (yes, it’s also a one-man show) and now we have numbers to show just how great the service is.
• Sanity check: I watch Twitter with a very keen eye, and my gut feeling is that the usage data above actually feels right. Nothing in it is very surprising and a lot of the rankings can be explained fairly easily. It’s important in any data analysis to do this kind of sanity check and I urge you to look at the numbers again and see if they make sense to you too.

References

• Data source: get.theinfo Google Group.
• Top 50 Domains (PDF file download): Top 50 Domains used in Twitter links.

This entry was posted on Montag, Januar 5th, 2009 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Cligs News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.