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.
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 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.
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.
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…
deleted by creator
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.
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
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:
- ¹ –
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.
How do they estimate?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
