Media Sites That Have Left Twitter Aren’t Missing The Traffic

Elon Musk has made it clear that he's no fan of the media. And while he seems to whine and pout when big media sites leave exTwitter, he keeps insisting that exTwitter doesn't need journalists, because the his view of citizen journalism will magically be so much better. Of course, at the same time, he seemed to think that the media needed exTwitter so much that they'd pay $1,000/month to be verified, which basically did not happen.

Then, of course, there's the recent nonsense of taking headlines away from link cards, which is a very anti-media move. And, of course, disabling the API made it so that sites like Techdirt no longer post to exTwitter at all, because we'd now have to do it manually, which is stupid. And while Twitter had been a decent driver of traffic over the years, it was never that big. And we've seen no clear decline in visits since Musk cut us off by cutting off the API.

It appears that others are seeing the same. Take NPR, which famously bailed on exTwitter after Elon falsely labeled them as state-affiliated media" in contradiction with the company's own explanation of what qualifies for such a label (which explicitly called out NPR as not qualifying). Elon did that to punish the respected media organization after he didn't like some of the reporting they had done.

NPR made the correct decision to say fuck this" and stop posting to its account.

Musk made some noise about how the organization would regret it, but... according to NiemanReports, it looks like there's no regret to be found:

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.

There's one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected - that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount," says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR.

Again, Musk will insist this doesn't matter. He'll claim that media that isn't on exTwitter is missing out and that the users of the site are replacing the media he hates. And, who knows, perhaps it'll happen. But so far, what the media is learning is that it just doesn't need Elon at all.