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
We did it Lemmy!
Lol the only reason I clicked into this is because the front page truncated “Discord” to “Disco” and I wanted to learn more about this next new social networking site…!
I’m ready for a funk-based social media.
Are you saying the closure of many of the subs from June 12-14 and beyond had a negative impact on website traffic?
Yep. They went from 1.7B visits to 1.7B visits
They can’t afford more decimal digits; it’s a free report.
Oh no!
They’ve been astroturfing with bots to pump those numbers
There are soooo many GPT comments and threads on Reddit, at least when I left on the first. I imagine it’s going to get worse and worse now.
It’s trivial to setup a LLM designed to argue or astroturf a point now. That’s the problem.
I have been noticing a few here and there on Lemmy too. Unsure how to report it as I kept getting errors.
Reddit started with nothing but sock puppet accounts created by the devs, so I could definitely see them doing the same thing to show “activity”.
Think about all those running power delete suite or similar.
I have just visited reddit for the first time in quite a while , the picture imo is pretty grim for reddit. Dead subs , little actual life , and when you log out the front page is dire. I think that actual content is key here and that is where the crisis for reddit is shown clearly. Talk of the protest not working is just that,talk , in reality reddit has been deeply effected imo
Seems like they just updated their mobile site, you no longer get the annoying popup telling you to download their mobile app!
It’s a trap! It still asked me
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.
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.
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.
Whatup Lemmy gang. Glad to be here.
Want some beans?
Does this account for traffic generated through official/unofficial apps?
Looks like no, it’s desktop only:
reddit.com’s traffic has decreased by 3.36% compared to last month (Desktop).
Interesting to note that if you scroll down further you’ll see that the #1 content referral to reddit is adult content at 20.6%, with second place being video games at 16.3%. A solid one fifth of the other sites pointing at reddit do so for porn, basically.
Feels like if it’s desktop only, these numbers really aren’t worth much. Isn’t a very large portion of reddit’s traffic on mobile? I probably spent less than 10% of my reddit time on desktop.
I think I’ve used the desktop version once; to set up my account.
My thought exactly!
I don’t think that SimilarWeb includes app traffic in their estimates; they seem to focus on web traffic only. App traffic would be interesting to track, though.
This could get very, very complicated. A lot of mobile apps are nothing more than a slightly customized mobile web browser, complete with web bugs. Others are native code with raw API/etc calls. Some are a mixture. And all of that kinda misses the point of the data that people want when they see these reports.
Lemmy.world is on there too - it wasn’t tracked in May but in June it was up to 3.5M visits with 970K unique visitors, so starting off pretty well.
July is what will matter. Most of either dropped or changed browsing habbits after July 1st
I really hope it will be at least another 7% If being this shity to their users ends up with loss barely above the rounding error, it does not bode well for the future.
We gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
I’m glad to see there are viable alternatives. When the niche subs move, it’s game over for reddit.
Good
How do they estimate?
Counting and that
