Programming @programming.dev varsock @programming.dev 2y ago

Twitter traffic appears to be declining since the beginning of the 2023 calendar year

https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains

Source of this is from Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare posted at 11:34 Jul 9,2023. It was posted to his twitter (@eastdakota). Not linking to twitter bc don't want a deadlink next time twitter makes API changes. And not to drive traffic to twitter :D

Edit: July 11th update, arstechnica published a detailed explanation

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/

36 comments

Oh no.

Anyway.
Feels like a “no shit, Sherlock” headline but good to see hard proof. Disappointed in it only being a small amount tho
- to be fair, the original poster used the word "tanking" and he knows a thing or two about DNS. I thought "tanking" was too click-baity and toned it down :D
  
  Tanking is accurate - they were the 32nd highest traffic domain and now they're 42nd (fell even further since that screenshot was taken).
  
  Ten places, when you're that close to the highest traffic domains on the internet, is massive. Twitter has gone from similar traffic to Bing to having less traffic than Spotify.
  
  Worse though - more than half of their losses over six months happened in the last week or two.
- I think it's more of a "thank God" moment than anything. The way shits been going these past few years it's completely possible thier traffic could have gone up. Just because.
- The dip is small but the enormous debt Elon put on its back will definitely kill it soon enough.
While I would love to see Twitter auguring straight into the ground, Twitter’s API changes would explain some portion of this traffic changes. I wonder if there are any other proxy measures for audience engagement as separate from basic traffic
- Between the egregious API pricing and the recent login requirement, this traffic graph makes perfect sense.
  
  I agree that we need some measure of actual engaged human beings before we start dancing on twitter’s grave.
- very good point
oh god, hopefully Musk can sue his way into making more people use it!! /s
I just deleted my Facebook and Twitter.
- Like just now? Why both?
Does Twitter use Cloudflare? I hate anything Elon and want him to fail, but it would be kinda crazy for the CEO of a company I use services with to broadcast an embarrassing indicator to the world that my business isn’t going well.
- I dont know to what capacity twitter uses cloudflare but cloudflare is rather ubiquitous. Even if twitter didn't have services with cloudflare, when a user's device resolves the domain name "twitter.com" to an IP address, it might go through Cloudflare's DNS servers. And givien the ubiquity of Cloudflare DNS, this is likely frequently. By monitoring the DNS queries for Twitter.com, Cloudflare can estimate the traffic volume by analyzing the number and frequency of requests received.
  
  I don't know why cloudflare's CEO would do that or where he keeps his huge steel balls, but today I learned I can mine Cloudflare's internet usage data. And I might have found a new hobby!
  
  Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..
  
  Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.
- I suspect DNS rankings from Cloudflare DNS lookups (1.1.1.1) makes more sense as the source of the data. However Twitter/Musk are refusing to pay rent and were even refusing to pay vendors like Google Cloud in an attempt to save cash and renegotiate prices. So I wouldn't be that shocked if Cloudflare terminated them for non-payment and publicly shamed them. Even then I think it's unlikely they'd do it like this as Cloudflare probably wouldn't want to concern their other customers.
- They use Atlanta Metro, AWS and GCP as far as I know. I want to say they own the Oregon DC but can't remember.
- Internet usage data were never secrets.
- Ok but you'd actually be paying what you owe for the services you receive, presumably.
  
  see comment above, but in short twitter need not hire cloudflare for services. Cloudflare plays an important role in the backbone of the internet. If twitter is resolved through cloudflare's DNS, cloudflare can estimate the volume of traffic to Twitter.com. This appears what had happened given the published graph is "DNS ranking". FYI, and for mine as well as I just discovered, we can generate that graph by our selves by using cloudflare's Radar API
What is actually meassured there? "Line goes down" is not necessary a bad thing:-)
- It measures the most popular sites by dns lookup. Twitter fell from 32nd to 39th.
  
  Well this probably doesn't measure any app user
This data is ugly. Label your axes. It could be 0.1% or a 25% drop.
- Did you even try to find them? I'm on my phone and I still had no trouble locating them.
Where on the radar dashboard can I see that exact graph?
- You'd have to make some API calls after you apply for a token. I am trying to replicate the graph for myself as we speak. Didn't know Cloudflare had this gold mine:
  
  Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..
  
  Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.

36 comments