Is Twitter is bigger than Facebook? Yes,  it is, according to one of its bosses. Although the Facebook user base touching 1.49 billion or roughly 20 percent of the world’s population and Twitter most recently reported only 316 million users. However, the numbers are wrong according to its chief financial officer Anthony Noto. He said that the way of measuring how many people are using the site is wrong. Noto argues that Twitter has a much bigger audience if you consider those who view tweets without logging into Twitter, or who get to tweets through internet search engines or see the 140-character postings on news sites.

Noto said to a technology conference that the size of the site depends on how we measure it. He added “I often get the question from friends [who] are like, a you know Facebook has over a billion users’, and I am like, ‘well, we have an audience, depending on how you measure it, that’s pretty comparable.” He also told that “But they only have that audience, they only have the 1.4 billion they report, there’s no other number. We have other audience numbers that no one talks about and when you add those up it’s a big number, in fact in some scenarios you could argue that it’s bigger.”

The “other numbers” that Noto was referring to are logged-out users (people visiting Twitter who don’t have accounts or don’t log in) and those who see syndicated or embedded tweets elsewhere.