Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible | Nieman Reports
niemanreports.org
The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.
  • alyaza [they/she]OPM
    74•9 months ago

    Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

    • m-p{3}
      47•9 months ago

      Hopefully that hurts the social media platforms more than they want to admit.

      • GammaEnglish
        26•9 months ago

        It does, social media is very headline driven. I’m not surprised traffic wasn’t affected much

        • loke
          18•9 months ago

          It can’t be headline driven if you remove the headlines. Musk, probably

    • @GrindingGears@lemmy.ca
      4•9 months ago

      The level of ad dollars flying away from Twitter this year has been staggering. Elon has come back from a lot of shit in the past, but I don’t think he’ll ever be able to recover it from this, it’s just going to be a long circle downward. He’s truly lost the plot on this one, and the world’s already moved on. Truth be told, I haven’t understood Twitter for years anyways, but that’s just me.

      Ad buyers are demanding accountability for their spends. They want to see justifiable results from their campaigns, so that means heavy measurement that can attribute their spend to quantifiable lifts. Meanwhile, over at twitter? You have a billionaire having a mid life crisis and sticking his thumbs in his ears going lalalalala, pissing off his entire user base and basically taking stances on his platform that no reasonable ad buyers can realistically support. Also doesn’t help when your user base is quickly turning into mostly far right wing maniacs. Not going to survive this new age of advertising, when that’s pretty much your whole funding model.