After taking the world by storm since its release last November, OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a traffic dip for the first time. According to a report presented by Similarweb, the Chatbot’s web traffic dropped by 10% in June, and the percentage of unique visitors also decreased to 6%
ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application ever, crossing 1 million users in just 5 days. For comparison, Instagram and Netflix took over 2.5 months and 3.5 years to acquire 1 million users respectively.
Source: ExplodingTopics
As of now, the site has more than 1.8 billion monthly users and has become one of the top 20 websites of all time. However, recent data suggest that the initial hype might wear off soon, as the site has recorded low user engagement and traffic for the past month.
What stats are we looking at?
According to a report presented by Similarweb, OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a 9.7% drop in web traffic and the percentage of unique visitors decreased by 6%. Lower engagement rates have also been recorded where the average visit duration dropped by 8.5% in May.
According to the report:
“ChatGPT no longer looks like it will keep growing until it’s the most-trafficked website in the world,” Similarweb said. “In other words, Google is in no danger of being eclipsed by the OpenAI tech demo site that turned into a cultural phenomenon.”
Source: Similarweb
What was the reason!…..behind the drop?
While the ChatGPT traffic drop has been making headlines, there are quite a lot of theories circulating as to why there is this sudden dip in user engagement.
Many believe that ChatGPT’s iOS app is behind it and deem it more of a traffic shift than a dip. And while we are on the shift theme, OpenAI’s models are also available for Microsoft Azure and APIs, so users may have moved on to such programmatic interfaces.
Another theory suggests that it is probable that people are just getting better at prompting ChatGPT and so spend much less time getting a task done.
However, the most popular theory by far suggests that the traffic dip corresponds with summer breaks in schools. Google Trends show that children are now more focused on Minecraft than ChatGPT, so this could likely explain the drop.
Source: Google Trends
Is the end near for ChatGPT?
Many people do not think that these theories make sense and are choosing to believe that ChatGPT’s hype is finally dying down.
Source: Twitter
But data suggests that ChatGPT still ranks much higher as compared to its competitors when it comes to user engagement and web traffic. Here is what SimilarWeb had to say:
“ChatGPT still attracts more worldwide visitors than Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, or Character.AI, the second most popular stand-alone AI chatbot site,” SimilarWeb stated. “Worldwide visits to Character.AI dropped 32% month-over-month, although traffic is still up tremendously from where it was in June 2022, when the company founded by ex-Google engineers was just getting started.”
How is OpenAI taking the traffic dip?
Regardless of the current statistics, it is hard to say if people at OpenAI are much worried about the traffic drop. The CEO recently shared that the cost of running ChatGPT was “eye-watering” and estimated at $700,000/day. And since ChatGPT mostly earns from subscription fees and license costs, a little traffic dip isn’t going to faze OpenAI.
According to the report:
“The main direct revenue ChatGPT earns is from subscriptions sold to those who want access to the latest and greatest version. Subscribers get GPT-4, for example, while free users get an older version.”
Microsoft also invested around $10 billion in ChatGPT and has integrated the chatbot with Bing’s chat service. However, the Browse with Bing feature was recently taken down due to potential misuse.
Hence, ChatGPT is likely unaffected by the sudden traffic drop and is all set to upgrade its models and develop more efficient mechanisms for people to experience generative AI up close!
In a nutshell
While ChatGPT has suffered a little in terms of monthly web traffic, it is still dominating the generative AI front with over a billion monthly users. It is hard to predict whether user engagement will continue to drop as users cannot pinpoint a reason behind the current stats.
It may be due to summer breaks or because the hype around AI chatbots is finally dying out. For now, we know that ChatGPT isn’t going anywhere anytime soon!
PureVPN
July 18, 2023
2 years ago
