Reddit Blackout has effected daily traffic to drop

Last week, almost 8,000 subreddits went dark for about 48 hours. This happened during a protest against the alteration in API fees for developers. Almost a week has passed, and many popular reddits are still dark, and it seems like there is no chance for their return.

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, expressed sadness that it might be abandoned. Additionally, he has taken on a dictatorial persona and is trying to remove moderators or compel them to reopen their subreddits. Which is strange because Reddit does not pay them and they are not its employees.

Now, we’re learning that this blackout had an influence on Reddit’s daily traffic from third-party companies like SimilarWeb. Before the blackout on June 12 began, SimilarWeb monitored over 57 million daily visitors to Reddit on desktop and mobile. That number fell below 55 million by the end of the first day of the demonstration. Additionally, it was more like 53 million visitors on day two.

That is a decrease of around 6.6% from the period before the protest. For Reddit, it was a relatively small drop, as Huffman had stated. But there was a considerable decline.

Reddit users were less active during the protest

Now, SimilarWeb has also observed that Reddit users’ time spent on the website has decreased much more dramatically. Users were spending an average of eight minutes and 31 seconds per session prior to the protest. By seven minutes and 17 seconds, the time had decreased. which was its lowest point during the previous three years.

Why has Reddit usage decreased? It’s fairly easy to understand: Less content was available on Reddit as a result of the removal of over 8,000 subreddits, many of which were among the largest on the platform. Many people probably opened Reddit and abandoned the app or website when they noticed that the majority of the subreddits they frequented had vanished.

Reddit will feel the effects of this. Will this now have a significant enough impact on them to cause them to reconsider charging for the API? We’ll have to wait and see.