Similarweb: Twitter referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12% on average from November 2022 to December 2022; only traffic to NY Post and Fox News grew
Digiday : Tweets: @mattmcgee , @martyswant , @mehdirhasan , @timgatt , and @dimensionmedia See also Mediagazer Tweets: Matt McGee / @mattmcgee : Purely anecdotal, but it seems to me that my tweets with links are getting less visibility than they did a month or two ago. (And less visibility than tweets w/o links, of course.) https://twitter.com/... Marty Swant / @martyswant : An analysis of a random set of 21 large and small publishers found that Q4 referral traffic from Twitter fell by an average of 13%, with 71% of publishers in the sample having referral traffic declines. https://digiday.com/... Mehdi Hasan / @mehdirhasan : “Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter's role as a traffic referral source to publishers' sites is largely declining” - except for Fox and the New York Post. Surprise!! https://digiday.com/... Tim Gatt / @timgatt : Not sure you can blame the removal of Twitter Moments for being the primary reason for the drop in referral traffic But it's no surprise publishers are investing in other platforms for engagement, traffic and revenue https://digiday.com/... David Bisset / @dimensionmedia : Anecdotal but this timing fits w/ my observations: “feels” like less engagement (even for me, and i'm not popular in the least) and seemingly less traffic and eyeballs since about November. Also those I follow: total is down a bit which means more blocked or closed accounts. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Similarweb's month-over-month cut of 12 major news outlets lands mid-collapse: Twitter was already reporting a roughly 40% year-on-year drop in revenue and adjusted earnings for December 2022 as advertisers fled, and publishers were watching their own numbers slide in parallel. The two outliers matter more than the average — the New York Post and Fox News were the only outlets whose Twitter referrals grew, suggesting the platform's remaining traffic is concentrating around right-leaning publishers.
The decline also fits a longer arc the corpus has tracked before: Chartbeat's five-year dataset later showed Twitter referrals falling from 1.9% of publisher traffic in April 2018 to 1.2% by April 2023, with medium-sized publishers hit hardest — echoing how Facebook's referral traffic collapsed nearly 40% after January 2017 while direct mobile traffic grew.
First-order effects
- The 11 declining outlets lose a measurable acquisition channel within a single month, forcing traffic teams to re-weight toward search, direct, and other social referrals just as Q4 audience reporting closes.
- The New York Post and Fox News gain relative share of a shrinking pie — if Twitter's algorithmic distribution now favors them, they capture engagement competitors are forfeiting.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that had staffed social teams around Twitter referrals face budget pressure to reallocate those resources, while rivals like Facebook — which already ceded its own publisher-traffic lead per the 2018 ratio study — become imperfect substitutes rather than obvious landing spots.
- Advertisers reading both the publisher-side decline and Twitter's own revenue collapse see corroborating signals on both sides of the ad market, accelerating the flight that drove the platform's December shortfall.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms stop functioning as reliable top-of-funnel for news altogether, pushing publishers back toward owned channels — the same direct-mobile shift that followed Facebook's retreat — and making outlet economics more dependent on subscriptions and search.
- A referral landscape where only ideologically aligned outlets grow suggests platform distribution is fragmenting along audience-political lines, raising the prospect of regulators and advertisers treating platform-driven news reach as a concentration risk.
The trend: Social platforms are exiting their decade-long role as news distributors, and each platform's retreat — Facebook first, now Twitter — forces publishers back onto owned and search channels while reshaping which outlets retain platform reach.