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There are appropriate periods to understand the fundamentals of a potential acquisition (preferably before any money is exchanged), and then there are the three weeks following the completion of the transaction on the platform that you have just purchased.
Elon Musk revealed yesterday that he is unaware of the website’s traffic counts (the number of clicks through to a link, such as an article or blog post), despite spending $42 billion on it. It is extremely odd how Twitter drives so few clicks, said Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance, before Elon Musk intervened to “correct” her with his own false facts.
It is really weird how Twitter drives so few clicks
— Ashlee Vance (@ashleevance) November 12, 2022
In a now-deleted tweet, Musk said, “Twitter drives a tremendous number of hits to other websites/apps.” “By far the biggest click driver on the Internet.”
The issue is that, according to the data accessible from online analytics tool Statcounter, this is far from the case, with the site actually producing referral traffic comparable to Pinterest. Users swiftly reprimanded him.
Here’s just the list for social media from Statcounter for example. This is *just* social media sites. Twitter isn’t even 10% of them! pic.twitter.com/W1RWkUNTL8
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) November 13, 2022
Even though that error was embarrassing, it was made worse when Twitter added a panel to his post noting that “readers contributed background they felt people might want to know,” which was effectively a community fact-checking function established before Musk took over.
Elon’s own website keeps fact checking him lmao pic.twitter.com/h2AzLyt3Yu
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) November 13, 2022
As anyone who has worked in social media for even a few weeks will know, Facebook continues to be the leading source of social traffic, according to a post that included a link to a report on social media referrals on the website Data Reportal.
According to Statcounter data, Facebook accounts for over 74% of all global referrals to social networking websites outside of China, according to the website. It’s interesting to note that according to Statcounter, Twitter and Pinterest are ranked second and third, respectively, and account for about 7.7% of all social media referrals.
Despite coming in second place in the research, Facebook is unquestionably the top click-driver online, sending roughly 10 times as much traffic as Twitter.
Musk eventually removed the tweet without providing a reason, but not before learning his lesson and double-checking his facts the following time he irritated engineers with a post about poor load times, which former Twitter employees and outside experts in the field called absurd.
Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
Matt Tait, a senior cybersecurity fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, commented on the tweet, “This is such a Rorschach test of a tweet.”
This is such a Rorschach test of a tweet https://t.co/IfW0lcEwQP
— @Pwnallthethings@mastodon.social (@pwnallthethings) November 14, 2022
“When non-technical people look at it, they think, “Oh wow, there are technical phrases and numbers; he must be extremely technical.” Technical people might immediately check to confirm that the number is much smaller after saying, “Ok, that’s BS, if there were 1,000 RPCs on load, the home screen would take minutes to load.””
A different user added, less kindly: “I want to apologise for how slowly twitter is in many places. The brofabulator is performing more than 1,000 grackenschnickels just to render a honkuplex after becoming disconnected from the hypermalacronker.”
