https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains
Source of this is from Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare posted at 11:34 Jul 9,2023. It was posted to his twitter (@eastdakota). Not linking to twitter bc don’t want a deadlink next time twitter makes API changes. And not to drive traffic to twitter :D
Edit: July 11th update, arstechnica published a detailed explanation
Feels like a “no shit, Sherlock” headline but good to see hard proof. Disappointed in it only being a small amount tho
I think it’s more of a “thank God” moment than anything. The way shits been going these past few years it’s completely possible thier traffic could have gone up. Just because.
to be fair, the original poster used the word “tanking” and he knows a thing or two about DNS. I thought “tanking” was too click-baity and toned it down :D
The dip is small but the enormous debt Elon put on its back will definitely kill it soon enough.
deleted by creator
Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.
While I would love to see Twitter auguring straight into the ground, Twitter’s API changes would explain some portion of this traffic changes. I wonder if there are any other proxy measures for audience engagement as separate from basic traffic
very good point
Does Twitter use Cloudflare? I hate anything Elon and want him to fail, but it would be kinda crazy for the CEO of a company I use services with to broadcast an embarrassing indicator to the world that my business isn’t going well.
I dont know to what capacity twitter uses cloudflare but cloudflare is rather ubiquitous. Even if twitter didn’t have services with cloudflare, when a user’s device resolves the domain name “twitter.com” to an IP address, it might go through Cloudflare’s DNS servers. And givien the ubiquity of Cloudflare DNS, this is likely frequently. By monitoring the DNS queries for Twitter.com, Cloudflare can estimate the traffic volume by analyzing the number and frequency of requests received.
I don’t know why cloudflare’s CEO would do that or where he keeps his huge steel balls, but today I learned I can mine Cloudflare’s internet usage data. And I might have found a new hobby!
Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..
Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.
They use Atlanta Metro, AWS and GCP as far as I know. I want to say they own the Oregon DC but can’t remember.
Where on the radar dashboard can I see that exact graph?
You’d have to make some API calls after you apply for a token. I am trying to replicate the graph for myself as we speak. Didn’t know Cloudflare had this gold mine:
Cloudflare Radar has an API that gives access to Cloudflare’s data on global Internet traffic..
Radar’s API is free, allowing academics, data sleuths and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet usage across the globe.
What is actually meassured there? “Line goes down” is not necessary a bad thing:-)
It measures the most popular sites by dns lookup. Twitter fell from 32nd to 39th.
Well this probably doesn’t measure any app user
App users still make API calls to Twitter’s domain. Depending on the domain name, these app users might still be counted.
