80% of engineers and overall staff were cut.
A year later, how does Twitter's web traffic & monthly active users stack up against other social media giants?
Global desktop and mobile traffic rose across all platforms, except for Twitter and Facebook.
US Monthly Active Users have either decreased or remained stable, with Twitter and Facebook facing the largest drops.
Since late 2022, Twitter leads in layoffs, slashing 80% of its staff, while Meta and Snap have also notably cut their workforce by 25% and 23%, respectively.
LinkedIn uniquely saw increased traffic despite workforce reductions.
Attributing Twitter's traffic and user decline solely to staff cuts is challenging, given Musk's major platform changes and bot removals.
However, it's widely acknowledged that Musk's use of Lines of Code as a layoff metric was, at best, questionable.
It’d be insightful to analyze how many top performers were mistakenly laid off for low LoC counts - false positives.
As part of our research on Software Engineering Productivity done at Stanford, we’d love to conduct this analysis using our novel way of measuring software engineering productivity (research paper to be published soon - please see my other posts for more info).
All the data is available in their GitHub history - all we need is for Elon Musk & Linda Yaccarino to agree. (Never going to happen, I know :-))
Methodology & Limitations:
To ensure comparability, we used a third-party provider (similarweb) for estimating traffic and MAUs across platforms, as companies report these metrics differently.
While this data might not be entirely accurate, we believe any biases will be consistent across platforms, leading to more reliable comparisons.
Layoff counts are based on publicly available data through company press releases.
