Reddit's Traffic is Down 3.36% Month-Over-Month, According to SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb has just released traffic estimates for June. According to these estimates, Reddit's traffic has seen a 3.36% month-over-month decrease.
For comparison, here's how traffic has changed for other popular social networking websites:
- Discord.com: +0.51%
- Twitter.com: -1.65%
- Instagram.com: -1.35%
- Facebook.com: -3.18%
- TikTok.com: +0.77%
- Pinterest.com: -2.27%
- Youtube.com: -2.02%
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/reddit.com/#overview
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I see a lot of people saying, "I can't believe it was only a 3% drop," and I'd like to offer some context as to why there's not enough data here to really tell a story, yet. It could go a few different ways.
The Reddit protests in June were a big deal, not just on Reddit or Lemmy, but to the media at-large. Traffic surely saw a huge influx of people wanting to look at the dumpster fire. I know that I myself used Reddit a lot leading up to the blackouts, since it was, in a sense, the last hurrah of Reddit as we knew it. The Spez AMA would have driven traffic. The NSFW sub protests would have driven traffic. All those news articles linked to Reddit directly, and they would have also driven traffic.
Even with all that, there's still a decrease in traffic. As others have said, July will be a better metric for the actual damage done, since the media has largely moved on and aren't driving as many visits, and 3PAs are toast.
These numbers would have been more representative if we could have had more than a quarter to look at. What was the QoQ trajectory before this? For all we know, this could have indicated business as usual, or it could have indicated something much bigger, depending on what the traffic metrics over the past 12-24 months could show us.
I also would have liked to see the history for unique sessions and unique visitors. If there was a huge influx of unique visitors compared to the past few months, but traffic was still decreased overall, then that would indicate it came from news clicks or bots.
Basically what I'm saying is that the data doesn't paint any kind of real picture right at this moment. That doesn't mean there was no impact though. Time will tell.
Thank you for understanding basic statistics and data analysis (some people here do not). It's all about the trends shown by the data, rather than the raw numbers.
There’s also the rapid influx of bots, since admins were using GPT bots to astroturf on their behalf.
More importantly, traffic is a trailing indicator. The protests and anger were from content creators and moderators. As they leave, the quality on Reddit will decrease significantly but that will take months/years. And the traffic will decrease but will follow the drop in quality content and moderation. Based upon the increased quality of posts on lemmy just in the last 3 weeks, many of the content creators have moved to the fediverse.