Twitter Is Not A Tentpole Traffic Driver For NPR

Originally published at https://pushroi.com on April 13, 2023.

Mainstream publications like The Atlantic, or The New York Times, or even digitally native publications like Vox and Buzzfeed, don’t get much traffic from Twitter. Extrapolating from third-party tools, Twitter drives around 3% of overall traffic for publications. The traffic is variable; here are 15 examples using data for March of 2023.

These numbers are approximately consistent across any batch of 15 publications. If using the same method to establish the Twitter traffic for the 15 media sites anyone most recently visited, I’d expect a similar spread where only entertainment or crypto news cracks 5% of total traffic from Twitter.

Let’s Talk NPR

I bring this up because NPR yesterday announced that the organization will no longer use Twitter. NPR.org seemingly receives about 1.68% of it’s traffic from Twitter. At the time of writing NPR has four of the top 100 podcasts on Apple Podcasts based on new subscribers weighted for recency. Other methods for calculation of popularity put NPR’s myriad of podcasts at over 20 million collective monthly listeners.

In broadcast across all member stations NPR reaches 23.5M listeners each week according to a sponsorship sales page. NPR doesn’t need to be…