NPR found what we all know, people just read the headline very few actually click the article.

"No impact" doesn't seem quite accurate considering they lost more than half of their Twitter traffic. It did only account for a small part of their total traffic though so I understand what you mean.

With this said, it sounds like NPR had no idea why they used Twitter. My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline. It gives them both money and tremendous power to set the narrative but few clicks. NPR instead measured their success in CTR which seems like a strange measurement for the genre, especially when you don't get your main funding from ads.

I think it’s just the start of the “the emperor has no clothes” iceberg that is social media. I actually think GP is on to something with their “nobody cares” bit, because if people aren’t going to follow you outside of X then they probably don’t really care about what you’re sharing. There is obviously a lot to be said about the large “community” but in many ways but if it’s just a lot of “talk” then where is the actual value in it? If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales then it’s just a waste of time, and how likely are you really to sell your product to people who won’t even bother following you outside of X?

> If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales

But that's kinda what I was targeting. I have friends that make a living by successfully funnelling their Twitter followers to Substack. What is a product sale for NPR? For some reason, NPR's KPI is measured by CTR for tweets like this:

"Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday. The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video."

Why would anyone click on that? It doesn't make much sense to me.

> My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline.

Just out of interest, what is that?