Reddit’s average daily traffic decreased during the blackout, according to third-party data

When more than 8,000 subsites went dark for 48 hours earlier this week to protest Reddit’s upcoming API changes, there were signs that the action was having an immediate impact on the platform. On the first morning of the protest, Reddit suffered a “major outage” that affected its desktop and mobile sites, as well as its mobile apps. Days later, the company’s CEO Steve Hoffman launched a media blitz as he tried to cast off affected users and moderators, many of whom give countless hours of their free time to make Reddit the vibrant platform it is today, as preposterous. V said meeting with the edge.

But beyond those signs, it was hard to tell how practical the protest’s impact would be on site traffic. Now we have a better idea. According to data provided to Engadget by the internet analytics company Similar siteThe effect was small, but noticeable. The day before the blackout began on June 12th, a similar site logged more than 57 million daily visits to Reddit across its desktop and mobile web clients. By the end of the first day of the protest, daily visits were less than 55 million. Then, at the end of June 13, a similar site logged just under 53 million daily visits to Reddit. Compared to the website’s average daily volume over the past month, the 52,121,649 visits Reddit saw on June 13 represented a decrease of 6.6 percent.

Over the same time period, a similar site has recorded a more dramatic drop in the amount of time Reddit users spend on the platform. On the day before the protest began, the average session on the site was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. After one day, that metric had dropped to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest such statistic in the past three years. Reddit did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment.

Looking ahead, the temporary drop in daily traffic is unlikely to affect Reddit’s near-term prospects. But many subreddits Continue to protest the company’s plans And as its leadership contemplates policy changes that could alter its relationship with brokers, the platform could see a slow but gradual decline in daily active users. This is unlikely to bode well for Reddit ahead of its planned IPO and beyond.