Answer by Mark Rogowsky, Entrepreneur, raconteur, @maxrogo, on Quora,
There's a pretty strong Twitter will never reach 1 billion monthly active users, but if it does, it will take years.
Leaving aside the minor fluctuations (See graph below), Twitter has seen its growth cresting for a while now.
While there is much to envy in having numbers that big, in the just reported quarter, Twitter said it has reached 271 million monthly active users. That's 24% more than it had a year ago, but shows the decelerating growth continuing.
Given that Twitter has been "sampled" by something around 3/4 of a billion people, it's not likely there is a catalyst that exist that will significantly re-accelerate growth. Please note, that doesn't mean growth can never re-accelerate. Twitter's new-user intake remains a mess, the product remains a bit of a mess in terms of showing why it's so freakin' compelling and there are gains to be made there.
But if we assume -- and it's likely that this is a reasonable assumption -- that growth as a percentage will continue to trend downward, here's what 20% compounded growth looks like for Twitter using the current quarter as our baseline.
2015: 330 million (22% in the coming year)
2016: 399
2017: 483
2018: 579
2019: 674 (growth is now down to about 17%)
Now, it doesn't take an amazing leap of the imagination to get the user base to 1 billion from there over the subsequent 5 years. In fact, 10% growth compounded will do it.
But we begin to run into what we often call the "Law of Large Numbers"[1], which in common parlance means "it's hard to grow once you're already big."
Consider that the 2019 growth of 100 million users is 40% of every user Twitter now has. While there is some weird internet meme that Twitter is waiting to be discovered by the masses[2], it's been part of mass culture for years already. It's been discovered. The masses, for whatever reason, just don't seem to care.
I love Twitter. I use it every day. I think it's amazingly powerful. I think in the scenario I've painted above, you could convince yourself that it's plausible Twitter will reach 1 billion MAUs in as little as 8 years and perhaps 12.
But I think it's equally plausible you could see growth of, say 12% compounded over the next decade and you'd "only" have 870 million users by then. I think you could see lower growth. China has its "own Twitter" in Weibo. Facebook continues to seek to compete, especially in the developing world via a stripped down version of itself that is more Twitter-like than you might realize. Messaging apps are becoming the center of the internet galaxy.
Oh, and Facebook? It's already at 1.32 billion users. By the time Twitter reaches 1 billion users -- if it does -- Facebook might well be pushing 2 billion.
[1] We misuse the term because the Law refers to something else entirely Law of large numbers
[2] Twitter Is Not Dying. It’s on the Cusp of Getting Much Bigger.
This question originally appeared on Quora: How long will it take for Twitter to match the one billion users that Facebook has? More questions:
