- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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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On the one hand, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But on the other, this is just for June. A lot of people left or drastically cut down their usage at the very end of June, and we’re not seeing this reflected in the data yet.
Even so, no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers. With 1.7 billion total, that’s still 51 million people. It’s a notable loss, especially for a company trying to become profitable and have an IPO.
I used Apollo right up until it shut down, and I haven’t touched Reddit since. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
Wefwef all the way now
I downloaded Memmy yesterday, and so far I like it.
Memmy ist really awesome! Intuitive, fast, great looks! Love itt!
And it is officially on the App store now!
It’s absurd just how good wefwef is as a web app. Such a natural transition from Apollo.
Since I’m here, RIP Apollo and thanks for all the hard work Christian!
WefWef on the desktop and Memmy for Lemmy on the phone…
I was also an enthusiastic Apollo user.
Other than Lenny, do you replace Reddit with anything else? This thread we’re in now is an exception - there are a lot of posts here. But most threads on Lemmy are pretty empty.
Thats why its up to all of us to start participating.
Protip: If you really want to start a conversation/get engagement, follow Cunningham’s Law:
the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
So, fill those empty posts with confidently incorrect statements and watch that comment section fill up as people rush in to correct you.
Actually, Cunningham’s Law says nothing of the sort. If you look at the source material as I have done - and in the original Phoenician, because so much is lost in translation otherwise - you’ll quickly note that Cunningham is really attempting to convey the hopeless sense of man’s search for purpose in a cruel, unforgiving world. While some scholars debate the literal truth to this sentiment as expressed by the author, it is generally thought plausible if not outright likely that these writings followed a catastrophic life event of some sort - the loss of a child or death of a spouse, witnessing the end of a great civilization, a dick pic delivered to the wrong person. While the specifics aren’t known, what we do know about the author is that he would likely be further distraught at the loss of control and ownership experienced with a misattributed “law” on the internet should such a thing even be imaginable.
I like this law
Most people didn’t create content and don’t interact with it (ie most people are lurkers). Take it upon yourself to comment and interact with posts and others will almost always join in and have something to say.
I used sync up until the 13th or so, then started limiting my reddit usage, and increased my lemmy usage until July 1st. Now I’m solely on lemmy on mobile, and only see reddit on desktop when I come across a search I need.
Same with me. I haven’t deleted my Reddit account yet, but will be doing that soon, after I delete or overwrite my comments of 10 years there.
Between Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon, I have plenty to keep me occupied in what used to be my Reddit-scrolling time.
Same. I still have the app as a reminder but this is my home now.
Weekend I’m going to see about spinning up my own instance.
I really missed Reddit at first and it took a while to get TestFlight on Memmy and figure this out but it’s looking good so far.
Yep. Just check the site to see if my data request has been processed. Replied to a message in which someone was asking about Lemmy. But that’s it.
migrated to wefwef, would prefer a native app, but nevertheless i’m not even looking back. 13 year club.
Same
Same, it took me to 7/1 for me to finally uninstall RIF. Let’s wait and see what July’s numbers look like
I agree. The real change will be from 1 July onwards since none of us can use our apps anymore.
Eh, reddit could’nt even do that right. They’ve not shutdown all apps
Yeah, I don’t exactly understand how but RIF is working for me, despite the fact you can’t log into it. I only kept it as a momento, but it still works as long as you have the subs you want to see memorized…
hate to be that guy, but I also want to contribute with content, so: It’s memento
It’s like reddit never left.
Yea, Infinity is still working
Infinity has Spez’s cock down their throat and is going subscription based.
It’ll be interesting to see how many users stick with the apps that are continuing. I think the devs are crazy to think that even more than 5% of the users they had will continue to use the app for $5/month. Especially when you can’t view NSFW content.
For whatever it’s worth, I doubt it comes anywhere near their throat.
Good one!
I am not paying, Its working.
I would love it if that was true, but think the impact of the blackout making ALL users unable to access whole swathes of the site might be bigger
I think there are still some subs that are private, and I know a couple went NSFW and a bunch are getting harassed by admins to reopen or remove the NSFW tag.
My friend told me the cyberpunk sub couldn’t reply to the email they got telling them to turn off the NSFW tag. Because nearly full on sex scenes, decapitation, huge hogs with giant titties is absolutely SFW.
Even if 3% is a low number, I guarantee that 3% were reddits more active users and content creators.
If most of the quality content slows to a trickle users will continue to leave and look for more viable platforms.
It’s not 3% of users, it’s 3% of traffic. This could be caused by 0.1% of power users leaving.
no company wants to say they’ve lost 3% of their customers
Reddit doesn’t see users as customers.
They are the product. A number that you can sell to advertisers and shareholders.That model started with literal radio. It’s not a new thing. We are the consumers and the advertisers are the customers. It’s kinda like how children are the consumers of toys but the parents are the customers. It actually makes business much harder because you have to keep two groups satisfied. The product is still airtime(radio), and nobody likes ads but they are sharing the space and funding the transmitter.
Don’t forget to donate to your local independent stations, folks. Radio is not free! Neither is Lemmy.
No company wants to say they’ve lost 30% of their top development, marketing and QA personnel.
They can still sell the raw product numbers, for as long as advertisers and shareholders don’t realize the product has turned to shit.
I think this an overly simplistic way to look at the dynamic. Users are the primary customer, and they don’t provide any direct revenue to the company. Their value is in attracting the secondary customers though, who directly pay the company to access the users. Bring a primary customer implies that the company still needs to treat you as a customer and at least not openly antagonize you. They can’t take you for granted as a product. There is no secondary customer without you.
It’s like bars that advertise free drinks for women on certain nights. The women aren’t directly paying the bar, but the men who come to the bar because of them makes it a net profit. I’m sure there’s other examples of this primary/secondary customer dynamic. Anything cheap for kids that sells expensive stuff to parents for instance.
overly simplistic way
It was hyperbolic of course. But really,
Users are the primary customer, and they don’t provide any direct revenue
How can someone who doesn’t provide revenue be the primary customer of a profit oriented company? Ahead of others who actually do, like advertisers?
It might be better if the terms are swapped. I’m only calling them primary because they have to come first before the secondary, and they’re the foundation for everything. There’s probably a better way to term them.
Oh, I’m not denying that the users are the foundation for the business model but when Reddit makes business decisions, they first listen to those who pay them.
They also don’t want to lose 3% of their product.
How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.
Alternatively, people with more time sign up and shitpost. I recall every summer break Redditors would complain. 🫣
That’s a good point although with smart phones, I wonder how much of the teenager traffic is baked in year round now. Summer Reddit was terrible but then it just became Reddit.
spaz: were not profitable, heres ways were gonna become more profitable.
redditors: ugh leaves
spaz: your small protest from the landed gentry cant hurt me.
redditors: ok, bye.
spaz: jgvbefgbaegbeQANGBLEw
Think of how many ‘users’ are bots that likely won’t continue to work since no one would pay the monthly sub to bot Reddit like in the past.
Yeah, I was using Lemmy and Reddit in parallel throughout June (aside from the blackout days, where I stayed off of Reddit out of solidarity,) and only really drastically reduced my Reddit usage this month.
Same. I spent most of June trying to find a lemmy instance to join. Quit cold turkey on 1st July along with nuking my post history. Keeping my account till 31 July just in case they decide to revert my deleted posts.
In history terms, 3% is everything. I remember seeing a documentary where a guy claimed that every coup in history, in which 3% of the population were ardently dedicated to the cause, has been successful.
I am wondering how user count is calculated.
I guarantee you that a huge percentage of Redditors have multiple accounts. Many of which might be inactive. Are all accounts ever created on Reddit still considered part of their current total or are only accounts active in the 6 or 12 months count? If people are legitimately leaving Reddit, I think their losses are going to steamroll because they won’t just lose one user, but instead they will lose that one user and their 2 or 3 alternate accounts as well.
Next month or three are going to look like a bloodybath for Reddit.
Can’t wait!
Also, this data isn’t from Reddit. It’s from SimilarWeb. They track browser access to websites, not API calls. Reddit absolutely won’t report their drop in API access, which is where the largest drop will be.
I suspect half that drop is from me alone, lol.
Reddit lost a LOT of their power users. Even if the general traffic isn’t that badly dented, it means a lot of the best content and conversations will not go back. Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.
I lurk the frontpage occasionally and I’ve already noticed the Reddit atmosphere has gotten … weird.
Little-known, content-churning subreddits are bubbling to the top because of all the other blackouts and desertions. Fringe viewpoints and wacko opinions that would normally get downvoted to the bottom of a thread are now out in the open because there’s no voice of reason to hold them back.
And the kind of people that are still on there, acting as if everything is fine (or, God forbid, better(???) than it was before the revolts) … it’s a very strange place now.
The meltdowns are something else.
On one smaller sub that participated in the blackout people were seriously accusing mods of rigging the votes to stay closed for longer. Of course nothing actually indicated that, and neither did they present any evidence, they just couldn’t stand not getting their content.
Same! I went to check it out earlier and the frontpage had a couple of subreddits I recognized but am not interested in, and the rest were all subreddits I had never heard of before. I also thought the scores seemed weirdly low, but not 100% sure about that since I dont usually pay super close attention. At least the weird vibe was pretty helpful in getting me to hop off, versus getting sucked in to browsing around more.
There was an r/Apple thread were people were going off about simplicity and just how hard it is to get into and use Lemmy… I am so glad I left lol
I didn’t make an account for awhile because so many people on Reddit were saying that. Once I finally did, I laughed how easy it was.
Reddit is pretty much at the point where you can open any thread on the front page and the comments will be indistinguishable from a Facebook comment section.
9gag… That’s a word I haven’t seen in a long time.
Reddit will stay, heck Digg if still around. It won’t be the same though.
Reddit will spiral down to a 9gag clone.
Back in the day, I discovered Reddit because people in the comments on 9gag would say a certain post was stolen from reddit.
I was a sucker for rage comics, so r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu (aka f7u12) was my gateway drug.
I got onto Reddit from a rage comic app. 11 years ago.
I’d start a f7u12 community here, but I haven’t seen a classic rage comic that was actually worth a wet slap in years
On the other hand, most upvoted posts and comments on redit are far away from best. I expect most of those people will not even notice, they just scroll over reposts and bot.
Even the porn subs are starting to be overrun by onlyfans spammers
I thought they always were.
I mean, hey, free titties but always there.
If only people would actually stop using Reddit instead of doing these useless “protests” like they do in /r/videos. They’re still using the site, that’s what Reddit wants…
I’ve been waiting for my third party app to break. Boost finally stopped working an hour ago so I signed up here.
Signed up three days ago but was still using Boost until it stopped working just now. Am now figuring out how Lemmy works.
Just FYI, the developer of Boost is making a version for Lemmy. I’ll definitely be downloading it once it’s available.
Welcome!
The Lemmy boost version is already in development and you can sign up for it already on the app store!
Hopefully we’ll get boost for lemmy soon
Do you think Boost for lemmy will give lemmy a boost?
Welcome aboard! There’s now over 400,000 of us! (Source).
Boost is still working for me, but I haven’t logged in/engaged since the blackout. If it does go any day now, I’m okay with that.
Same, ‘cept my 3PA died a few hours before it should’ve. Reddit admins are clowns.
It’s still working for me?
The protests aren’t all useless, necessarily.
Subs that go NSFW are depriving Reddit of advertising revenue, and sites that change their purpose are likely to drive away some users who don’t want to shitpost, who might then go looking for alternatives.
except they are useless when reddit will just remove anybody that doesn’t play ball
I doubt it’s seriously hurting Reddit, if at all. People would really hurt Reddit if they just stopped using it entirely. No posting, no commenting and no lurking.
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 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.
Looking at the pages for lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, as well as lemm.ee paints an interesting, if expected, picture.
For one thing, lemmy.ml is categorized as “Games > Games - Other (In United States)” which made me scratch my head to the point of hurting my scalp. The rest are uncategorized (which is better than being miscategorized, imo).
Now, for the stats:
Instance Total Visits for June 2023 % Change from May 2023 Bounce Rate Pages per Visit Average Visit Duration #1 Incoming Traffic Source (from social media) reddit.com¹ 1.7B -3.36% 37.98% 6.21 8:24 Youtube (52.48%) lemmy.world 3.5M n/a² 38.12% 6.62 8:44 Reddit (97.29%) kbin.social 2.9M +5000% 26.24% 11.2 9:18 Reddit (93.92%) lemmy.ml 1.5M +1716% 51.79% 5.55 3:54 Reddit (98.86%) feddit.de 791.7K +5000% 55.88% 2.76 3:57 Reddit (98.31%) beehaw.org 790.1K +5000% 35.48% 4.50 5:44 Reddit (96.24%) lemmy.ca 186.4K +1615% 69.14% 2.45 1:05 Reddit (100%) lemm.ee 167.5K +5000% 29.58% 6.73 5:18 Reddit (86.81%) - ¹ –
reddit.comis included as a point of comparison - ² –
lemmy.worlddidn’t exist yet in May 2023
We can see that the larger instances are already performing well in comparison to reddit when it comes to “interaction” statistics. It’s a surprise, however that
kbin.socialtrounces everyone else it was compared to–even comparing favorably withlemmy.worldin visit numbers. In comparison,lemmy.mlperformed quite badly especially in bounce rate and average visit duration. Someone who’s better equipped than me in analyzing these figures can perhaps do a better anaylsis, but from what I can see, we’re not doing that bad here.I’ve also added
lemm.eeinto the mix just for good measure (and perhaps as a proxy for smaller-ish instances), and it’s doing quite good as well.
EDITS:
Something to keep in mind to contextualize the interaction statistics: the density of contributors to lurkers in these numbers will be drastically higher here due to the greater barrier to entry as well as the average user type of the migration. It should be expected that the average user in a niche/early-adopter community will be more active.
Not me! I intend to be just as much a lurker as I was on Reddit!
Thanks! What do you make of the unusually high bounce rate (and low average visit duration) for
lemmy.mlthough? That has been a head-scratcher for me. Did it not gain people from the migration as well (which makes for better interaction)?Could it also be due to load/server issues? When I have trouble with page loads on .world I have a tendency to bounce and have a low average visit time.
I’m actually quite the opposite, I wait until a page loads. Between the two of us, it evens out, lol!
But yeah, I have a pet theory as to why
lemmy.mlhas a high bounce rate and low average visit duration: people migrating from Reddit dismisslemmy.mlfor whatever reason and check out other instances instead. That’s probably also why it didn’t gain as many users as other instances (comparatively speaking).I think lemmy.ml restricted registration and had a PSA telling people to join other instances. They didn’t gain that many users because they didn’t want to, probably because their infra couldn’t handle it (hence also the bouncing).
This, as well as their performance seems to paint a picture that explains the figures in the table. Thanks!
Could it be due to the fact they restricted registration? Not sure if it happened in June or July though.
It was in June, during the protest-blackouts.
What do you make of the unusually high bounce rate (and low average visit duration) for lemmy.ml though? That has been a head-scratcher for me.
It shouldn’t be a head scratcher. lemmy.ml was running like ass for much of it, with some periods of being completely down. Poor performance will drive up your bounce rate massively.
Ah, I see. I wasn’t aware that it was that bad over in
lemmy.ml, thanks!
Lemmy.ca is +1615%
Added
lemmy.cainto the table as well, because, damn, what a ride! I suppose given from the explanation I was given regardinglemmy.ml’s figures, it wasn’t able to cope well with the flood of incoming users, I suppose?I think non English speaking instances like feddit.de are also not to be underestimated.
Damn. You’re right! I was surprised that it surpassed Beehaw.org in page views.
We’ve actually handled it very well as while it’s a major instance we are on the smaller side we also moved to a dedicated server at a good point right before it reached the limits of the VPS it was on.
Thanks for the clarification. I was just guessing based on similar bounce rates and average visit durations (
lemmy.caandlemmy.ml).
Okay, but 52% of traffic on reddit is coming from Youtube??? Those channels that just compile reddit posts must really be helping Reddit. Lets make some Lemmy reading channels
As far as I understood that stat, it’s traffic coming from “social media sites” that’s counted there. What their definition of a “social media site”, I’ve got no idea–especially not since they include Youtube in that designation.
So from what I can tell the visits to the main lemmy instances are only ~.5% compared to total visits to reddit (1.7 billion vs 9 million). Smaller instances might bump that up to .7% or so. Reddit’s 3% drop in visits might be mostly due to people using the site less, while transfers to lemmy account for only a fraction of that. Still cool, though, hopefully we can keep the momentum going over the next couple months.
I really wish someone can compile the figures for all Lemmy instances (and Kbin) so that we can make such a comparison. But yeah, other alternatives also popped up such as Tildes, Squabble, Raddle. I suppose that can also make up for part of the missing 3%. Of course, there’s also a sizeable number that have simply stopped using Reddit (be it in protest or other reasons–such as seasonal variability, as in people are actually touching grass!).
I actually forgot to include Tildes, Squabble and Raddle into the table, but then again, I was only trying to compare what we gained here against what Reddit has lost. I hope that this momentum (loss for Reddit, gain for the Threadiverse) keeps going. But more importantly, that we keep the engagement here at a high level in both quantity and quality.
Where’s this data coming from?
Same website as used in the OP, SimilarWeb.
- ¹ –
This is for June. Third party apps were still working, and personally I didn’t change my Reddit browsing habit much during June. Now that third party apps are officially dead, I’ve been on Reddit a lot less, and been spending more time on Lemmy. Curious to see what the numbers look like for July.
I just realized that today is the first day in YEARS that I didn’t access Reddit. Sad, but it is what it is, and entirely their fault.
I was a heavy user before, for sure. I used to scroll Reddit for hours a day. I uninstalled my app when the blackouts started. If I do a google search where the answer is on reddit, i’ll still look at that answer. But for the most part, I am gone. Seems like a lot of people are all bark no bite though.
This gets made back by September.
95% of people who use reddit use the official app or website, and don’t notice a single thing except the occasional stray John Oliver meme.
Not enough hobby communities left.
Havent been there since the day of the blackout, not missing anything.
Most of that traffic is probably lurkers and content consumers. Reddit will continue chugging along for a bit, but the loss of power users and mods is about guaranteed to wither the platform over time.
One point to keep in mind is that drama also brings engagement IN, not just out. When the drama subsides, the temporary boost in activity from new users or lurkers will go down too.
That being said, the percent decrease was always gonna be in the single digits. The average redditor was never gonna stick with a prolonged protest of a service that remains free to use.
I still visit reddit maybe once a day for 10 minutes for niche subs or communities that aren’t built up here. If those communities develop here, I will fully cut out reddit.
Edit: also when noting that I use Lemmy amount 90% of the time now, but my overall usage of Lemmy/reddit has gone down. Probably for the better, because I started reading again.
Are you me? I’ve been off Reddit like a week now and I’ve already read two books with the extra time I don’t spend doom scrolling.
In fact, I am you. What are we reading? I just finished 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and Project Hail Mary.
Good stuff. We just read Cinema Speculation and the first volume of Elric of Melniboné.
niche subs or communities that aren’t built up here
Oh how I wish someone would make a shittymobilegameads community.
…or for me to get the willpower and motivation to do it myself.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram. Holy shit is it pay-to-play a cesspool. And I’m being targeted for ads for all kinds of ponzi schemes and crypto and FOREX scams. Probably from watching Coffeezilla videos.
We’ll see how Lemmy picks up. I’m really liking it, thus far. Right now we’re looking at Reddit like a former, toxic partner that we want to spite. Lately I was just going on the World News, Ukraine war mega thread.
If it wasn’t for my photography, I’d delete instagram
It’s funny, but my photography is precisely the reason I’m not on Instagram. Since day 1 I’ve never thought it is a good place for actual artistic photography; indeed it kinda directly undermined artistic photography back in the day with the “all photos must be square” rule. I’ve always considered Instagram more of a place to share snapshots. Flickr isn’t what it once was, but it’s always been more of a true photography-focused social media site.
Just like Etsy. Its a horrible place to try and build a business and be creative and make money, and is being overrun by dropshipped tat, but its where everyone goes to get nice things, so its where people have to sell
I’m a hobbyist and I went there to get something nice and save myself some time making it. I expected high quality reasonable cost and I found average/low quality high cost. Disappointed.
I’m in the same boat. Been trying a few different Instagram alternatives for a few years but the user bases are all too small. Pixelfed and Vero seem decent but too much of a ghost town to feel it’s worth continuing to post.
I haven’t tried Pixelfed yet. I just got into the Fediverse and several instances on Lemmy. So I’ll eventually try Pixelfed. But 500px and Flickr seemed kind of dead to me. Vero and Vsco, I’ve heard mixed things, but also ghost-towns.
It’s to the point in IG that not even close friends nor family, see what I post. Adam Mosseri and Mark can fuck right off.
That may sound like not a lot, but Facebook as been hemorraging users for a few years now, if they’re losing users at about the same rate as Facebook, that’s a big oof.
I think the big deal will be if it’s sustained. Losing a bunch of users for a month isn’t a big deal if they come back, or at least stop leaving. If Reddit loses 3% of its users every month for a year then things will be pretty dire for them.
Can’t say I’ve got much sympathy for Reddit, though.
I would expect July to be higher since 3rd party apps were still functioning in June. That was the first wave, the second wave would have been after the apps actually shut down and will continue for a while as people see lower quality and people talking about other sites.
Agreed on all counts, but y’know doesn’t look good before an IPO, I hope it gets worse.
Facebook “lost” a lot of users when GenZ decided they didn’t want to make accounts, but Instagram and (likely) Threads, did a fine job supplementing that. Meta corporation as a whole doesn’t have a big issue with maintaining their userbase.
