Dear Progressives, Twitter Is For Conservatives Now
I read an interesting post by @dangillmor@mastodon.social about progressive journalists whining about how Twitter is sending them less traffic nowadays.
While most of the journalists blamed Elon Musk for ending select Twitter features as the cause for traffic decline, these two paragraphs highlighted the real reason why traffic is dropping off right now.
Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to November 2022, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic. Some publishers — such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo — each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 10% and 18% month over month.
Only two publishers in the sample set — The New York Post and Fox News — saw their traffic increase while People’s website traffic declined by 46%. In most cases, changes were sharper than publishers saw between November and December 2021, when most publishers in the sample set saw traffic increase rather than decrease. (DigiDay, Note: Emphasis mine.)
For those of you unaware, both Fox News & the New York Post are conservative news outlets who both lean right, respectively.
Twitter has been purchased by @elonmusk@twitter.com who often caters towards the conspiracy conservative movement also known as the “alt-right.”
Progressive news outlets, politicians, activists, etcetera, should expect to see their influence dramatically decline on Twitter in 2023, while the opposite will be true for conservative news organizations, politicians, activists, etcetera.
While I expect Twitter’s overall influence will decline this year, I believe the site’s void will eventually be replaced by Instagram (which has become more “news worthy” as of late) as well as Youtube who has already mimicked most of Twitter’s features.
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