Topic users are still barely clicking on the links

Two years later, the topics began to look more and more similar to the most applicable competition for X. It has passed 350 million users per month earlier this year and Mark Zuckerberg expected that the next Meta application would be for a billion.

But themes still do not send much traffic to other websites, which can make the platform less attractive to creators, publishers and others whose work depends on web sites that are not owned by death. According to a similar, the Marketing Intelligence Company increased the external referral movement from the topics to 28.4 million visits in June. This is a noticeable leap of 15.1 million visits a year ago, but it is still relatively small given that the threads are more than 115 million users per day on its application, according to ThanPWeb.

Users of regular themes have long suspected that Meta Defritists with links. During most of the last two years of the presence of topics, common wisdom has been that users should not share links, or should only share them as a basic publication. Instagram president Adam Museiri, who also oversees the topics, did not encourage him completely. He said last year These topics do not deliberately reach links, but “we do not put a great value on them” because “people do not like and comment on the links a lot.”

Meta’s reluctance was not just user preferences. The company was also concerned about how to offend the use of indiscriminate mail and other bad actors on the links on the text -based platform. Recently, Meta has A changed pathAnd I have taken steps to connect more “good” links in the recommended publications.

“We have worked to make sure that the links are classified properly,” Mosciri said. In June. “The links were working better for more than a month now.” The company also strengthened links to the articles of association by allowing users to add more links to their interconnection indicators and providing related analyzes of the “visions” feature. “We want the topics to be a place that helps you grow your arrival – even outside the topics,” Meta said in the May’s update.

But despite these changes, themes still send a very little traffic to web sites. The similar data appears in May and June last year – when I had topics more than 150 million Monthly users – I send only 24.8 million referrals to external web sites. During May and June this year, this number increased more than twice, as it rose to 51.8 million.

However, these numbers still indicate that the majority of users of interconnection indicators are rarely, clicking on the links they see on interconnection indicators. Lea Haberman, a social media marketing advisor and author of the Icymi newsletter, said it is not surprising. “People have just trained not to search for them, not to include them, and not to think about it,” as I told Engadget. “You cannot turn a key and suddenly you expect people to adopt links.”

Publishers, a group that is likely to publish links on topics more than anyone else, does not seem to see a large traffic indicators as well. The data provided by Chartbeat, a company that provides analysis data for publishers, shows that the viewers ’views of the interconnection indicators have almost doubled since the beginning of the year, as it rose from 8.8 million in January to 15.1 million in June.

Interestingly, according to both similar data and Chartbeat for 2025, referrals of themes reached their peak in March. In that month, the interconnected indicators sent 28.8 million external referrals to the web sites, according to ThanPWeb, while Chartbeat publishers witnessed 25 million views from the platform.

But while the latest statistics show that traffic from topics has grown significantly during the past year, it still represents a small percentage of the public publishers in general. According to Chartbeat, the topics in the past and a half of the topics were constantly less than one tenth of the referral movement in the sites. Compared, Facebook referrals have come about 2 to 3 percent during the same period, while Google Discover may represent about 13-14 percent of referrals. Even among other “small” sources of referrals, such as ChatGPT, Reddit and Perplexity, the topics are only confused in terms of the number of referrals he sends.

Fitzing up to pale compared to Twitter, which was He never knew As a large traffic driver even before Elon Musk acquired the company. In January 2018, Twitter 3 per cent of the viewers’ views, according to Chartbeat data I mentioned before the Click the newspaper. By April 2023, after MUSK, but before the site was renamed to X, this number decreased to 1.2 percent.

Chartbeat data is not a complete picture – the statistics provided to Engadget have been based on an analysis of 3000 sites chosen to share unknown data – but the slight increase in the referral movement is almost lined with a major change in the main change this year. In January, after Mark Zuckerberg moved to Ending the truth of verification of the truth The rules of moderation toured the content, as the topics have ended Endowment When recommending the political content of all users.

After this change, some political news publishers, including Newsweekand Politico and Forbes I saw a rise in referrals of topics, Diller I mentioned. But it seems that these gains are not universal, and it is not clear why some publishers may benefit more than others. “Themes are largely giving in traffic, subscription transfers, and general conversion rate”, compared to Bluesky and X, Boston Globe Mark Carolian’s vice president recently subscriber Topics.

Although the growth of topics has not yet been disabled his inability to push users outside the platforms, it may become an increasingly important problem for Meta if she really wants to bring more creators to the platform. The company is also preparing to turn the key On ads On the platform. The base of users that ignore links may complicate the Meta stadium for advertisers, who already take Cautious approach To topics. Mita refused to comment.

Haberman says that disagreement of topics towards links may be a symptom of a greater identity crisis that the platform still faces. It contains a large user base, but it is not always clear who is truly strands. You notice that it is unknown as a destination to follow urgent news, such as Twitter once, or as a place with highly involved sub -cultures. “The topics need to have a purpose,” she says. “Now, it seems very similar to the square of suggestions at work as people offer just complaints and shocks.”

Whether it is smaller platforms like topics can reliably push traffic to web sites, it is increasingly urgent. At a time when searching on the Internet feels the form It gets worseThe artificial intelligence replaces many searches and distorting the movement of web sites. Publishers, as Wall Street Magazine newly I mentionedIt is severely hit through these transformations.

Topics are unlikely to fill these gaps on their own, even if the referral movement improved significantly. And publishers in particular they have a lot to Causes Do not become dependent on an accessible platform. At the same time, it is clear that there is an opportunity to play indicators of interconnection a larger role in the post -research world. This will not only benefit the creators, publishers and owners of business that META has done for a long time, but can help the topics create its own identity.

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