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
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.
Same
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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…
How do they estimate?
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.
A large number of people joined Lemmy before July. The user based for Lemmy jumped by 1600% if I remember right before July 1st
A 1600% increase in Lemmy could still be the result of a 3% drop in Reddit. There’s a massive difference in scale between the two sites.
As per the above comment, a single stat rarely paints a complete picture.
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
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.
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.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 withlemmy.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:
- ¹ –
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.
Did the same thing and deleted my account. My muscle memory can’t find the app and my battery last a full day.
I open all of my apps by usings iOS search feature, i’ll occasionally still type “apollo” and be like, “oh yeah, i dont have this anymore”. It isn’t as often now though, compared to the first few weeks.
They’ve been astroturfing with bots to pump those numbers
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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 don’t think that many content posters will leave. Sure, in tech oriented communities they will, as they are the ones most receptive to fediverse or other alternatives.
But painters, photographers, historians, chefs… etc are a large part of what make reddit great. And plenty of those don’t really give a fuck about the platform. They will just use the official app and move on.
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.
Not enough to matter. Not even out of step with any other social media site lol. We’re doomed
I thought about this comment, and realized that somehow, I just don’t care so much about what happens to Reddit anymore. Instead of worrying about what I left behind, I’m looking forward to what’s ahead of us.
I think it’s because even before the whole 3d-party-app drama, there already was this undefined feeling that Reddit’s best days are behind it. Maybe it’s the effect of ad money and monetization, or it’s the inevitable trend towards low quality content that comes with mass adoption, probably it’s both.
Whatever the cause, in most subreddits, the old Facebook-style rot had already set in. Once-cool subs now being an endless barrage of tired memes, bots farming karma, and people being assholes. The things I joined for years ago, the engaging discussion, random encounters with amazing experts, the cutting-edge internet anarchy, it’s all already long gone.
When I opened the app (Baconreader in my case), I only did it out of habit, to then spendy time scrolling through an endless list of things that made me slightly go “heh”.
So, maybe most people will stay on Reddit for now, and probably I will have to leave behind certain communities instead of finding direct replacements. But I see that as a good thing. As long as even just 2% of Reddit’s users make it here, I’m excited it will grow into something much better than what I left behind.
Yeah. Something something … The company we keep.
It shouldn’t matter if Reddit has a larger user base, etc. As long as the quality is high here, I’m happy.
Lemmy’s been a. Breath of fresh air for me. Feels a lot like Reddit in the ol’ days and prefer it over Reddit.
If that means we have a lower user count than Reddit … Sure. As long as y’all here with me, we have made Lemmy successful.