A prolific elite produces half of Twitter content, study finds

There’s a good chance, according to a new study—unless, of course, you’re among the prolific Twitter elite.

According to Yahoo Research, 50 percent of all content consumed on Twitter is generated by 20,000 users. There are approximately 200 million Twitter members.

That means a mere .01 percent of the users are generating half the tweets. (The study says .05 percent, but do the math.)

The study examined 260 million tweets sent from July 28, 2009, through March 8, 2010, that contained bit.ly shortened URLs.

If so few people are producing these tweets, how are they reaching the Twitter masses? According to the study:

“Although audience attention is highly concentrated on a minority of elite users, much of the information they produce reaches the masses indirectly via a large population of intermediaries.”