X’s decline in engagement and its ability to drive traffic is the topic du jour, with several days of bad PR for the Elon Musk-owned social network. Over the weekend, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, and data analyst Nate Silver, previously of FiveThirtyEight, feuded over whether or not X was still capable of sending traffic to publishers. This was followed by a report from NiemanLab on Wednesday, which suggested that adding links to X posts is bad for engagement.
On Thursday, the prominent digital rights group and nonprofit EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) announced it, too, was leaving X after seeing decreasing returns from its posts. In a blog post, EFF’s social media manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said that leaving X after almost 20 years on the platform wasn’t “a decision we made lightly,” but explained that the math no longer works out in its favor. In 2018, EFF’s posts to Twitter saw between 50 and 100 million impressions per month, she said.
By 2024, its 2,500 posts on the social platform generated around 2 million impressions per month. Last year, EFF’s 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. The organization will continue to post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere on the open social web, noting that its presence on a platform is not an endorsement of these services.
We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we’re posting on,” Thomas said. The news organizations may have had various reasons to leave X, but traffic could have kept them around. For some, like NPR and PBS, the departure was a reaction to Musk’s decision to falsely label them as “state-affiliated media,” a title typically reserved for mouthpieces of governments that lack editorial independence — such as Russia and China-based propaganda networks.
For others, like Le Monde, it was a reaction to Musk’s close ties with Trump. But it’s easier to take a stand when you have little to nothing to lose. Today, any source of traffic is highly valuable, as publishers deal with shifts in online consumer behavior.
AI usage is ramping up, killing traffic to publishers at the same time that news sites are seeing declining referrals from search engines and Facebook. That’s left many newsrooms to fold under the financial pressure or conduct layoffs. In Bier’s debate with Silver, he accused newsrooms of using X wrong.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
