Gabe Bullard at Nieman Reports, reporting an internal memo from NPR, which left Twitter back in April:
Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.
There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.
I can confidently say that leaving the platform has not been the disaster I once feared it would be for Relay FM or 512 Pixels. The core Apple community landed on Mastodon, while the rest of the world is slowly moving to Threads.
The lesson to learn here is that when those two platforms implode — and at some point they will — everything will be okay then, too.