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.

Publishers Digiday spoke with mostly blamed the removal of Twitter Moments in December as the reason for this drop. As a result, they are investing in other social platforms, like LinkedIn and Facebook, and in formats like newsletters as their advertisers request to stay off the platform.

Data shows publishers’ Twitter referral traffic declines

Web publishing tech provider Automattic analyzed a random set of 21 large and small publishers and found that the sites’ traffic from Twitter in the fourth quarter fell, on average by, 13%. Of that data set, 71% of publishers saw their traffic decline. That Q4 data includes traffic from before Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October.

Todd Blackmon, who oversees Automattic’s global marketing agency partnerships — which acquired Parse.ly in 2021 — said the declines could be from a number of factors. For example, it could have dropped if publishers decreased ad spend or from people using Twitter less and therefore tweeting out fewer links to news articles. [Editor’s note: Parse.ly is a contracted vendor with Digiday Media].

Executives at two publishers who agreed to share their own data on the condition of anonymity saw Twitter referral traffic cut in half.

A head of social at a large millennial-focused digital publisher said they saw a 36% decrease in referral traffic from Twitter from Q3 2022 to Q4 2022 across their sites. Some of its titles with a smaller audience and Twitter follower count saw up to a 99% decline in Twitter referral traffic. The company experienced a 42% drop in Twitter traffic from Q2 to Q4. Twitter accounted for an average of between 3% and 5% of the company’s total traffic, which was cut in half when Twitter Moments stopped getting picked up in October.

Another head of social at a large regional news publisher said that while they have seen traffic from Twitter decline all year, traffic halved from October to December from about 5% to about 3% of overall traffic.

Impact of Twitter Moments removal

Both publishing executives blamed the removal of the Twitter Moments feature — which allowed publishers to curate and highlight content around a large news event — as the …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron