X Ad Portal Traffic Rebounds in Q1, up 29% YoY

TikTok (+58.6%) and Snapchat (54.3%) saw even bigger gains; Reddit ad traffic was up 10.9%.

Until recently, Twitter’s transformation into X under Elon Musk seemed to diminish advertiser interest in the platform, but the first quarter of 2024 could be the beginning of a turnaround. Traffic to the social network’s ad portal (ads.twitter.com) was up 29.2% year-over-year (YoY), according to Similarweb traffic estimates.

Traffic does not equal revenue, let alone profit, but we track visits to the ad portals of the social networks as a leading indicator of the health of their businesses. TikTok and Snapchat saw even stronger ad traffic growth, but at least X is no longer showing a shrinking audience for its ads.

Key takeaways 

• In addition to increasing this quarter, X’s ad portal traffic was up 42.3% YoY in March, according to preliminary estimates.
• While X’s ad portal traffic is recovering, worldwide traffic to twitter.com was down about 7% YoY on both a quarterly and monthly basis. As of February, the most recent month for which monthly active user estimates are available for the X app, usage was down 12.5% YoY (US estimates for iOS and Android combined).
• Traffic to the business.facebook.com website, used for ad buying and other business purposes across Facebook and Instagram, was down 14.2% YoY in Q1. But Meta’s business performance has generally been better than that metric would suggest.
• The ads portal for TikTok (ads.tiktok.com) had the biggest traffic increase of these competitors, rising 58.6%, while Snapchat’s (ads.snapchat.com) was up 54.3%.
• Reddit, which has been in the news because of its recent IPO, received 10.9% more traffic YoY for ads.reddit.com. Truth Social, which also made news for the IPO of its parent company, has yet to establish a similar ads portal.

X’s ad traffic recovery is just the beginning

From a broader perspective, X’s recovery is only beginning. Based on the past 12 months, compared with the previous year, traffic to X’s ads.twitter.com is still down 1.8%.

Twitter faced steep challenges building a successful advertising business under its old management, and Musk has yet to prove that he can do better.

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Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".