Nielsen posted an update to their controversial report and in the process raised more questions than they answered. The biggest problem is Nielsen's original claim that user retention is critical to long term growth. While retention does play a role in growth, it is not as important as Nielsen states. As can be seen in the chart below, a website with over 60% passer-by traffic can still reach 20 to 50 million US UMV's. If you would like to see the data set, please check it out here. All of the data points were taken from Quantcast.
Without knowing what sources Nielsen is drawing from, it is difficult to make an "apples to apples" comparison. Take for instance their chart on over thirty unnamed Twitter related sites and applications. For the analysis to be worthwhile, Nielsen would have to weight the audience retention by the size of the user base for each platform and have an understanding of the crossover usage between each platform. The chart would be misleading if it is just the average of the sites and applications Nielsen measured.
Nielsen posts "So, as an update, we went beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 websites and applications that feed into the Twitter community including: TweetDeck, TwitPic, Twitstat, Hootsuite, EasyTweets, Tumblr, and many others." The Twitter community criticized Nielsen because they had not included mobile and stand alone applications with which a user would not have to visit Twitter.com. Instead of addressing just those applications, Nielsen included anything to do with Twitter in their update. This further illustrates Nielsen's lack of understanding of the user base. It's not immediately clear what the user retention of TwitPic, Tumblr, and Twitstat has to do with the retention of the Twitter user base. Let's examine TwitPic. TwitPic's audience is a subset of Twitter's audience. If retention is 40% for TwitPic, it's quite possible that reflects the users that are posting pictures. A portion of the other 60% is likely not defectors, but those Twitter users that view a picture from time to time.
Finally, Nielsen leaves out Twitter's mobile aspect in their updated report. Mobile Twitter usage goes beyond Iphone's and Blackberry's. As I pointed out in my previous post, one of Twitter's strengths is that they understand the importance of the fast growing mobile web. Hence Twitter's 140 character limit purposely coincides with the 140 character limit for SMS messages. Nielsen is certainly engaged in the online space and a great source of data, but their follow up report still misses the mark.