SportyTweets 5 times bigger than StockTwits

Yesterday Robert Scoble posted an interview with Stocktwits founder, Howard Lindzon. Howard is an engaging man, and is very active in the tech world. He was also behind Wallstrip, among other ventures.

What stood out to me is that Howard touts that StockTwits now has 80,000 subscribers. That number seems small to me for a company which has raised $1.5M in venture capital, has been covered extremely well in the online tech community, and is well connected to the online financial world. I realize we are living in the post Ashton Kutcher race to 1M followers (now well above 2M), and that 80,000 may seem a lot smaller in those terms. But, it’s very small, isn’t it?

In contrast, SportyTweets has 375,000+ subscribers, is engaging its community of followers, working directly with content partners, has raised no venture capital, all while laying below the radar of the tech community.

Although taken differing approaches, both StockTwits and SportyTweets are trying to accomplish the same goal – separating niche verticals from the mass Twitter audience, aggregating the conversation, and providing services those users want. I believe SportyTweets can take a few lessons from Stocktwits on some its feature sets, as we have still a lot of development remaining to complete. However, it’s striking that all those dollars have garnered only 20% of the audience of SportyTweets in relatively the same amount of time.

And to be clear, this blog post is not meant to bash or tease Stocktwits in any way. I guess, I’m just shocked that SportyTweets has performed so well when comparing it to a well oiled engine, such as Stocktwits.

I firmly believe that both services are in their infant years. As the Twitter community continues to grow, I look forward to the continued growth and maturation of both services, and welcome success to each.