This chart should worry Elon Musk
- Twitter's traffic rank has been declining since January, according to a graph by Cloudflare's CEO.
- Elon Musk's takeover of the social media app has led to whiplash for users experiencing its changes.
Predictions about Twitter's waning appeal have been a recurring theme of discourse around the app since Elon Musk took over last fall. A new chart by Cloudflare's CEO appears to put some numbers to that idea.
Since January, Twitter's ranking has fluctuated downward, according to a graph that Matthew Prince – CEO of security and cloud company Cloudflare – posted on Sunday. Prince tweeted: "Twitter traffic tanking," along with a graph of company data indicating that Twitter's ranking dropped from 32nd place to 39th place over the course of 2023 so far.
Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.
A representative for Cloudflare confirmed to Insider that the data in the graph comes from the firm, and reflects the volume of requests coming into its domain name system resolver called 1.1.1.1, a tool that helps users access websites.
"Since we are looking at 1.1.1.1 traffic for the Twitter.com domain, it likely captures both web and application usage (as both would use hostnames within that domain)," David Belson, Cloudflare's head of data insight, told Insider in a response emailed through the representative about what the data in the graph reflects.
"Having said that, it is not directly showing web or app usage," he added.
The company also said it doesn't have data on the number of visits to Twitter's site during the corresponding time window.
Prince's tweet about Twitter's apparently declining traffic ranking power comes as Meta's competing social media app Threads just launched this month and rose to gain 100 million users within days. The new app owes much of its early success to Instagram. New users can easily sign up for Threads via the Instagram app and transfer their followers across.
In the backdrop of this contest is also an apparent social media scuffle between Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously teased a cage match with each other that never materialized.
Now, not only has Twitter threatened legal action against Meta over Threads, Musk has also tweeted the idea of a "literal dick measuring contest" against Zuckerberg.
Threads is the latest app to join the buffet of social media options that have emerged as potential alternatives amid a sense of instability on Twitter. Some controversies on the app since Musk took over include the verification status of news outlets, celebrities – and other popular, established accounts being thrown into confusion – and users experiencing periodic outages.
More recently, many users also received the now infamous "Rate Limit Exceeded" alert while trying to use the app, a temporary feature that had vastly reduced the number of tweets that could be read at a time.