Reddit's Traffic is Down 3.36% Month-Over-Month, According to SimilarWeb

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 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.

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 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.

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.

They’ve been astroturfing with bots to pump those numbers

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:

• ¹ -- reddit.com is included as a point of comparison
• ² -- lemmy.world didn'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.social trounces everyone else it was compared to--even comparing favorably with lemmy.world in visit numbers. In comparison, lemmy.ml performed 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.ee into the mix just for good measure (and perhaps as a proxy for smaller-ish instances), and it's doing quite good as well.

EDITS:

• Added lemmy.ca into the table as well.
• Added feddit.de into the table.

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.

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.

That seems small given the number of Redditors here

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 it will go down a lot faster now that they've blocked API calls to NSFW subs.

This is likely to not even include the exodus from the 1st of July onwards also. That's when my partner and I moved over here. Will be interesting to look again at the start of August, check the true scale of their fuck-up.

It will be much more interesting to see a year from now, after most of the actual content posters and decent mods have left. 🍿

I'm genuinely surprised the Lemmy exodus has been as large as 3%. Reddit will be just fine. This isn't like Digg > Reddit.

I mean, this is actually a lot like Digg > Reddit, the same class of user has migrated. It's just that Reddit has long outgrown that techy/nerdy demographic. I doubt they'll miss us much.

Nor do I want that other 97% to follow us to Lemmy, especially.

Appears that this doesn't include July numbers. I think most of the people leaving Reddit, myself included, didn't do it until our 3rd party apps actually got killed on July 1st. Will be interesting to see these numbers at the end of the month.

Zero surprise. Most people are living life on autopilot. They will continue to ignore major issues—like politics, climate issues, and corporations mistreating people—to our collective long-term detriment. Anecdotally, I have friends who don’t give two fucks about such important things. Instead, they focus almost purely on MMA, reality TV, and stand-up comedy.

I mean, we all have hobbies but damn, pay attention and take a stand on serious issues that affect us all.

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 would really like to be a fly on the wall at their meetings to know if that is in line with their expectations or not.

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.

Source: https://pro.similarweb.com/#/digitalsuite/websiteanalysis/overview/website-performance/*/999/3m?webSource=Total&key=lemmy.world

Would be interesting to see engagement metrics as well.

Not enough to matter. Not even out of step with any other social media site lol. We’re doomed

A well deserved outcome. Companies need to realize that they are nothing without their customers/users. An undeserved arrogance can only lead to eventual downfall.

Lemmy user count for the same time period:

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=30

Remember about the Pareto principle: roughly 20% of users is probably responsible for the 80% of the content. This 3% is quite a lot in this context, especially considering the active people are probably much less complacent in this regard.

Need to be take SimWeb data with a bit of a grain of salt. Having used in previous businesses their results are indicative. They smooth big m2m changes from memory.

Are you saying the closure of many of the subs from June 12-14 and beyond had a negative impact on website traffic?

That was me and all my alt accounts. The real numbers will be next month.

Now that Reddit made the decision to move it's NSFW content behind it's app, this decline will 3x in speed.

I didn't think I would cut it completely, but once Sync died I tried to use the browser and it just forces that app on you. The app is unusable and very unenjoyable. Cold Turkey it is.

I imagined the numbers would be a touch higher but 3% feels shruggable.

I think the real question that these numbers don't tell you though is the quality of the content. When I have popped on just out in f curiosity and not logged in, the new 'front page of the internet' appears to be whitepeople twitter and memes. Doesn't look inviting enough for me to log in at all.

We gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.

Just found out about Lemmy for the first time, joined, and am loving the layout/website/app so far. Probably going to switch over to just this over time.

We did it Lemmy!

July is what will matter. Most of either dropped or changed browsing habbits after July 1st

I'd be more interested in next month's stats

All the media standing on the protests actually probably drive traffic to Reddit

Is this common for this time of year? I know I’m online less in the summer. Reddit is going/has gone to hell, but it seems like there are other factors here

SimilarWeb needs to invest a little in their presentation skills. A bar graph with no difference in the bar heights is not very interesting. And are they aware you can use more places after the decimal point? "1.7B" above each bar doesn't help at all.

With RIF down I've been trying to use Lemmy but I had to actually delete the app because 10 years of muscle memory kept trying to open RIF. Still having issues with Lemmy at this point so unsure if I'm gonna stay. Not very many other places to go now, though.

We did it, Red-- I mean, Fediverse!

I'm only hopping on reddit momentarily if I'm looking for specific information. For my casual browsing, I've largely transitioned over to here, and I'm enjoying myself immensely.

I'm not surprised it's a huge drop, but there's a vindictive part of me that wants the bleeding to continue.

July is the real indicator with API being turned off on June 30th. I don't think the protests themselves had a big enough drop off, but I have to assume a lot of folks have either left or use only desktop currently once that happened.

Does this account for traffic generated through official/unofficial apps?

July will be more interesting to see since the third party apps didn’t die until June 30th.

If it remains a one-off, it won't make much of a difference. If it becomes a trend, spez is toast.

Whatup Lemmy gang. Glad to be here.

This should continue as search results begin dropping Reddit search results as searchers land on a deleted topic, back out and go elsewhere. The engines track all that. Reddit will be seeing a big drop in trust metrics for a while.

The more I'm learning about Lenny's markdown the more I forget about what's her face

Does it include clicking onto the site through a google search for troubleshooting or something? Or is it registered users? Because I would count as using reddit in that case, even though it was through an Adblock and I didn’t click any further.

97% of the traffic but a shit load more data to monetize on each user is a win for reddit.

Let's keep the momentum. I find Reddit overwhelming.

So they also lost ranking (I assume to discord that moved up in to 4th place)

For real though, let's stop talking about reddit here.

Huh. I'm surprised it's around the same as Facebook. Two additional facts I'd like to know about the other social networks in order to make a comparison:

• App/mobile usage (this link only covers desktop)
• Bounce rate +/- for month to compare with Reddit

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

It's an exciting development! I have been looking forward to having such an overview available. It will be interesting to follow the progress—I see great potential in Lemmy, but it requires a larger user base to make a significant impact (in my opinion).

So, let's hope that the traffic jumps over here instead - and that they bring along the good posts 🤞🏻

That's a disappointingly low number. I was honestly fully expecting closer to 30% drop.

Seems like they just updated their mobile site, you no longer get the annoying popup telling you to download their mobile app!

Let’s keep that trend going

Compared to the other platforms it seems really insignificant, tbh.

I'm glad to see there are viable alternatives. When the niche subs move, it's game over for reddit.

The real data point will come in a few months/years. On every social media platform, a small percentage of users drive the majority of content. On Twitter, for example, 25% of the users create 75% of the tweets. So estimating the effect of Redditgate by traffic is a poor metric (at best a trailing metric). Lots of lurkers (which is the vast majority of users) will still drive traffic until the content becomes worse. And for the many users and moderators of Reddit which were creating and curating nearly all the content, I've got to believe a significant percentage are irretrievably angered by their FREE efforts being dismissed by u/spez and have left. Just losing the efforts of the bot subreddit over the next few months will flood Reddit with exponentially increasing shitposts.

I think many are coming to Lemmy just based upon my anecdotal observation that the quality of posts on Lemmy has increased dramatically in the last 3 weeks.

Some 3rd party apps still work, and I currently mainly use Sync for Reddit (patched through ReVanced) while transitioning to Lemmy. I begin to like Lemmy more, but I lack some communities that exist on Reddit. Hopefully, it's just a matter of time until Lemmy will have all of the Subreddits.

How do they estimate?

It just so happens after I left Reddit I went on tiktok a little more to check it out. And a few communities moved to discord.

Interesting…

Watching this overall situation in regards to social media develop is fascinating.

Good, let it die. Then stop talking about it entirely, mk?

Maybe its artificially held up to cover it up

i used to put lazy mode in infinity app and fap to all the posts i don't know if the official app has one

That's really not a lot considering the amount of crying everyone was doing. I've just had a look from my PC and it's no different to how it was before pulling the API plug. People quickly fold it seems.

More. MORE!!!

So nothing moving in any direction really... Just goes to show the average person really doesn't care, they just want to get back to their addiction

Not enough to break the ranks of Mordor.

They’ll survive and keep going. They’re mainstream now. Total ass, but most people don’t care.

Good