Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible
Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible
The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.
Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.
Danielle Nett, an editor with NPR’s engagement team, writes in the staff memo that spending less time on Twitter has helped with staff burnout. “That’s both due to the lower manual lift — and because the audience on Threads is seemingly more welcoming to publishers than on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign,” Nett writes.
Snark and contrarianism, on reddit?! I'm shocked!
Plenty of snark and contrarianism on Threads don’t know what dafuq they are talking about, sounds like nonesense.
There are just less people on Threads.
Good. I hope people and organizations keep leaving.
The level of ad dollars flying away from Twitter this year has been staggering. Elon has come back from a lot of shit in the past, but I don't think he'll ever be able to recover it from this, it's just going to be a long circle downward. He's truly lost the plot on this one, and the world's already moved on. Truth be told, I haven't understood Twitter for years anyways, but that's just me.
Ad buyers are demanding accountability for their spends. They want to see justifiable results from their campaigns, so that means heavy measurement that can attribute their spend to quantifiable lifts. Meanwhile, over at twitter? You have a billionaire having a mid life crisis and sticking his thumbs in his ears going lalalalala, pissing off his entire user base and basically taking stances on his platform that no reasonable ad buyers can realistically support. Also doesn't help when your user base is quickly turning into mostly far right wing maniacs. Not going to survive this new age of advertising, when that's pretty much your whole funding model.
I think everyone is seeing that the worth of social media isn't worth what you need to pay now
I think you are going to start seeing an ad exodus from social, that's my prediction. Connected TV ad spend is going to be what catches all the ad dollars in 2024, especially if Netflix and Amazon start sliding towards exposing their viewers to more ads. Social media is going to start its long decline as a result, turning into pay to play as they all try to survive a world with declining ad revenues.
Being insufferable is a great way to become redundant. Doesn't matter if you're a platform or a person, rich or poor. Anything can be more trouble than it's worth. And if you are given the chance to stop and think about it, it's probably been true for a while already.
To the surprise of no one.