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
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.
what surprised me here is how much traffic bing gets 😅 integrating with AI was a real pro move, it seems.
Any insight into how much the reduction in traffic is just restricting API usage and actual user interaction? Surely there is a correlation in more API usage (if not just scraping) would drive more engagement?
The dip is small but the enormous debt Elon put on its back will definitely kill it soon enough.
Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.
Oh no.
Anyway.
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
I just deleted my Facebook and Twitter.
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.
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
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.
