Over the past few months, traffic to the site formerly known as Twitter has taken an absolute nosedive as competitors like Bluesky and Threads continue to bring in more and more users.
According to the traffic-estimating service Similarweb, visits to the Elon Musk-owned social network now known as X have plummeted drastically over the past three months.
As the data shows, global traffic to the site has fallen from roughly 706 million visits in September to just 586.6 million by November — a 10.5 percent drop in the past month alone.
The numbers reflect repeated mass exoduses from X. Soon after a wave of exits that followed Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, November again saw users fleeing in droves after the site updated its terms of service to allow Musk’s AI venture xAI to train on its user data.
Naturally, that change had many users looking for greener — or bluer, as it were — pastures, and Bluesky was happy to reassure X refugees that their data was safe on its site.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data,” the company said in a November 15 post on its own social network. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”
Similarweb data also suggests that while Twitter’s traffic has fallen, it’s skyrocketed on Bluesky, likely reflecting many of the same users switching services.
In September, there were only about 68 million visits to the site — but by November it pulled in 132 million— an increase of more than 75 percent just from October to November.
In fact, the data shows that as of November, Bluesky was pulling in a full 21 percent of Twitter’s monthly visits, which is an extraordinary accomplishment for a little-resourced upstart — or, depending on your perspective, a striking testament to Musk’s toxic influence over the formerly beloved Twitter.
One more striking datapoint is that Similarweb’s data shows the average visit to Bluesky lasting more than twice as long as the average visit to Twitter.
An important caveat: all Similarweb can estimate is how many people are visiting each social service’s site, so none of this data reflects the usage of either one’s app, which is likely to account for a significant portion of total usage.
But the web traction of the two sites, which have a very similar interface, is likely to be a strong proxy for app usage, with many members using the web version on their desktop computers and the app on their phones.
In other words, though Bluesky remains smaller than Twitter in absolute terms, it’s growing at a frantic pace — which, if Musk is still a remotely rational businessman, just might be making him very anxious.
More on Twitter: Change to Twitter Suggests Elon Musk Is Panicking Over Users Leaving for Bluesky
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