Twitter’s shrinking role as traffic source for news publishers revealed

I think a large part of this is due to API suspensions. I got the infamous "This is a notice that your app - "your bot" - has been suspended from accessing the Twitter API. However, you can self-serve reactivate your app for free" With a final: "Your application has been reviewed. Thank you for your interest. Unfortunately, we're unable to approve your application." This for a small bot that followed a couple of weather gurus to be notified on Telegram on a new tweet. They killed a huge ecosystem in the hope to stimulate direct site engagement.

According to the graph at the beginning, overall referral traffic right now is higher than it was in April of 2018, and it is currently trending up for the last 9 months.

Later in the article, There are graphs that start at a different period of time from April 2021, which was in the height of the pandemic.

Without comparing twitter referrals to all other social media referrals, the significance of twitters decline from april 2021 to now doesn't really mean anything on its own. We don't know from the information provided if all social media referrals have declined since April 2021, but I would assume they all have.

This gives the impression that the data was picked to represent the peak of social distancing and widespread social panic compared to right now where all people want to do is meet in person and go outside after being cooped up with no social contact for 2+ years. This strikes me as nothing more than riding the current trend of musk-twitter sensationalism.

If it were an honest look into twitter as it fits in the space of all internet social media, it would at least compare it to other social media growth. Its pretty clearly cherry picked data without meaningful comparisons for context.