Twitter Is Surprisingly Small Compared To A Bunch Of Other Apps And Online Companies

REUTERS / Stephen LamDick Costolo, Chief Executive Officer of Twitter

When Twitter goes public - as it is expected to do this week - there will be increased scrutiny of its user base. Right now, Twitter has 232 million monthly active users, of which 53 million are in the U.S.

That makes Twitter much smaller than Facebook, which has 1.2 billion monthly users.

That's not surprising. But it is surprising just how small Twitter is compared to a bunch of other online businesses.

Two Asian messaging networks, QQ and WeChat, are both bigger than Twitter. LinkedIn is bigger than Twitter (although the metrics they report favor LinkedIn).

Even Candy Crush Saga maker King.com is bigger than Twitter. And Candy Crush is growing so fast it may yet on its own eclipse Twitter.

Even Hotmail - the Microsoft online email product that became so uncool they rebranded it Outlook - is bigger than Twitter.

To put this in perspective, in Q3, Facebook added 182 monthly active million users from the year before: Facebook basically adds the equivalent 78% of Twitter's entire user base to itself every year. And Facebook adds the equivalent of nearly four U.S. Twitter user bases in the same time period.

Here are some stats, for perspective.

Selected online/media properties ranked by user-base

• Facebook: 1.2 billion monthly active users.
• QQ: 818 million users.
• Gmail: 425 million, at least.
• Hotmail: 300 million users.
• Yahoo Mail: 281 million users.
• LinkedIn: 260 million registered users.
• King.com: 247 million monthly active users (of which 132 million are playing Candy Crush Saga).
• Whatsapp: 350 million monthly users.
• WeChat: 236 million.
• TWITTER: 232 million monthly active users.
• Instagram: 150 million users.
• The Super Bowl's U.S. TV audience: 110 million.
• Pandora active users: 71 million
• TWITTER's U.S. audience: 53 million monthly active users.
• Snapchat: 26 million users.