Twitter's had a big 2013 so far – first partnering with video looping service Vine then extending its advertising options to television and tracking users around third-party sites.

But at the end of the day it's the numbers that really matter, and a recent study from the clever sorts at Statistic Brain shed some light onto the current state of affairs at Twitter.

Half a billion

Twitter now has 554,750 000 active registered users, around half that of Facebook. 135,000 people become tweeters every day, while 190 million are active monthly users.

Some are more retiring than others – 40 per cent of Twitter users never tweet.

Search top tweets

The average number of tweets per day? 58 million. That's 9100 every second. Average number of search requests Twitter processes in the same period? 2.1 billion.

Mobile

Tweeters are a mobile lot, with close to half (43 per cent) using their phone to access Twitter.

They also like trying different things: 60 per cent of tweets come from third party applicants.

Cash

Twitter not only growing in users and hashtags – revenue is also rising. In 2011 Twitter's annual advertising revenue was US$139 million This rose to US$259 million in 2012 and is projected to top US$400 million this year.

To find out more visit statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics.

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