Hit in the heart by Threads, Twitter sees its traffic plunge

Cloudflare’s CEO has shared a graph bluntly revealing the concerning drop in traffic that Twitter has been exposed to since January. Turbulence increased by the arrival of Threads on the market.

It’s no secret that Twitter has seen better days. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk last year, the social network has continued to decline, both in terms of image and in terms of the experience offered to its users. And if the leak of advertisers observed for many months was at first a vector of concern, today it is the loss of traffic which could give cold sweats to Elon Musk and the staff of Twitter having escaped his wrath. .

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has indeed shared (on Twitter as on Threads, a sign of overtime), a graph representing the loss of traffic recorded on the platform since January 2023. There is a first drop in traffic. notable influx between February and April, then between April and June… and finally in July, with a very marked drop corresponding more or less to the arrival of Threads on the market. An effective alternative to Twitter offered by Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Threads enjoyed lightning adoption with 100 million users attracted in just 5 days.

Twitter: faltering traffic that unfortunately has nothing to do with chance…

The prosperity of the very young Threads platform and the traffic problems observed at Twitter, however, seem to be two sides of the same coin. Twitter’s erratic policy since Elon Musk’s takeover is indeed pushing many users into the arms of Meta’s brand new service. And despite the recruitment of Linda Yaccarino, appointed CEO a few months ago (but whose room for maneuver seems limited), Elon Musk remains the main master on board. A leader who multiplies both absurd decisions and reversals that are harmful to a majority of users.

In recent months, the experience offered by Twitter has indeed been greatly degraded. In addition to increasingly visible shortcomings in terms of moderation, the social network of the boss of Tesla has increasingly focused on the users of its paid program Twitter Blue… to the detriment of the quality of service offered overall. “Non-paying” users have thus seen certain once-free functionalities arbitrarily taken away from them (such as two-factor identification by SMS, for example), while watching helplessly as a new algorithm seriously reduces reach of their tweets to benefit those of Twitter Blue followers. Recently, Elon Musk finally announced a new limit on the content consulted. A very unpopular measure which also seems to have accentuated the drop in traffic unveiled this week by the leader of Cloudflare.