July 13, 2023
Threads surpassing 100 million sign-ups in just five days has led to a decline in traffic to Twitter, according to data from Cloudflare and SimilarWeb.
Twitter traffic has been trending downward since January, but the launch of Threads seems to have accelerated this decline. In the two days after Threads launched, Twitter traffic dropped by 5% compared to the same two days in the prior week.
Analyzing the initial impact of Threads, web analytics firm SimilarWeb found that Twitter’s traffic dropped by 5 percent during the first two days of Threads’ launch, as compared to the preceding week. Furthermore, when comparing the same time frame year over year, Twitter experienced an 11 percent decline in traffic.
SimilarWeb Senior Insights Manager David Carr emphasized the significance of Threads’ influence, stating, “We’ve been reporting for a while that Twitter is down compared with last year, but Threads seems to be taking a bigger bite out of it,” in an interview with CNN.
Twitter execs Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino have tried to reassure investors that Twitter’s user engagement is still strong. They have pointed to a new metric, called “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime,” as evidence that Twitter is still popular. However, some analysts have questioned the validity of this metric.
The sources for this piece include an article in ArsTechnica.
