Traffic to Twitter’s Ad Buying Website Continues to Decelerate As Elon Musk Makes Tender Offer to Take Twitter Private

Traffic to Twitter’s ad-buying portal grew, but not by much, in the first quarter of 2022 – which could foreshadow unhappy news when the company reports earnings for the quarter on April 28.

Update April 14, 2022: After buying a large stake in Twitter, then declining to join its board, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk offered to buy the company for $43 billion – his “best and final offer” or else he may walk away from his investment. “Twitter has extraordinary potential.  I will unlock it,” he promised in an SEC filing. In addition to forcing changes in Twitter’s “free speech” policies, Musk has talked about moving Twitter to a revenue model based on subscriptions rather than advertising.

Key Takeaways:

• Visits to ads.twitter.com grew 3.5% year-over-year in the first three months of 2022, according to Similarweb estimates, down from 9% in Q4 and 16% in Q3 of 2021. Q1 2022 ad traffic was down 4.1% from Q4 2021.
• Historically, the rise and fall of Twitter ad revenues have closely tracked traffic to the ads website on about a 3-month lag, according to Similarweb analysis. That held true for the company’s last disappointing earnings report.
• By comparison, Twitter’s ad portal topped LinkedIn’s, which saw 1.3% year-over-year traffic growth for the quarter. But Twitter lagged Facebook, which grew ad portal traffic by 22% – even as Facebook’s overall web traffic numbers are slumping.
• The fastest-growing competitor among social networks remains TikTok, which saw almost 200% growth on a smaller base for the quarter.
• On the other hand, web and mobile visits to twitter.com grew 6.4% in the first quarter, while Facebook’s traffic dropped 10.4%. February’s earnings report of Facebook’s parent company Meta was the first time Facebook reported a decline in daily active users. However, it seems that the gain in Twitter’s competitive position for user engagement hasn’t yet translated into more ad buyer interest.

This is a time of transition for Twitter, where company founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO in November, elevating former CTO Parag Agrawal to company leader.

Earlier this month, Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and critic of Twitter’s content moderation policies, announced he had bought a 9.2% stake in the company, making him Twitter’s largest shareholder.

Meanwhile, Twitter is working on technological changes including the introduction of an edit button and a long-term plan to move toward a more distributed, blockchain-based architecture that would potentially allow online communities more autonomy and get Twitter out of the business of making centralized content moderation decisions. Twitter has already embraced the crypto movement in other ways, for example by adding support for NFT profile pictures in January.

In the short term, however, the most important business priority for Twitter remains the ad sales that flow through ads.twitter.com. Here’s what momentum there looks like compared with key competitors.

Of course, momentum isn’t everything – scale also matters. The volume of traffic to Facebook’s ads portal dwarfs that for Twitter to an even greater extent – and even TikTok is now ahead of Twitter by that measure. These numbers don’t tell us the price advertisers are willing to pay, but they do reflect raw interest.

Twitter Tops Facebook in Web Visits Growth

In terms of overall web traffic, Twitter is at least growing. In contrast, Facebook has seen negative year-over-year comparisons in Similarweb’s estimates of web and mobile visits.

Upstart social media site TikTok has much greater momentum, growing more than 75% in February 2022, compared with 7.5% for Twitter, and -10.5% for Facebook. TikTok was growing even faster (from a smaller base) a year ago, when its traffic growth in January 2021 was over 500%. It’s that momentum that we see reflected in the growth in interest in advertising on TikTok.

Notably, Facebook still attracts significantly more traffic than either – and that’s not even counting the popularity of its other Meta property, Instagram, or its budding VR metaverse efforts.

Conclusion

Interest in Twitter ads, continued to decelerate in Q1 2022, as measured by visits to its ad-buying portal, while TikTok is coming on strong as a competitor. On the other hand, desktop and mobile web visits to twitter.com are growing at a time when facebook.com is seeing declines in traffic – a sign that Twitter must be doing something right.

The Similarweb Insights Newsroom is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Data for Charts  

Social Network Ad Portals

Twitter vs. Facebook and TikTok

Contact:  

David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager, david.carr@similarweb.com

Citation:  

Please refer to Similarweb as a digital intelligence platform.

Methodology

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