Documenting the ongoing rise of alternative social media, January 12th

One week ago, CloutHub was an obscure site no one had ever heard of.

Alexa uses data from browser extensions to estimate how much traffic websites receive. They publish worldwide scores that are based on 90-day rolling averages and individual country scores based on 30-day rolling averages. This website is not endorsing any particular social media over another. Try them out and use the one that you like best.

Parler’s USA Alexa score went down slightly today, even though the site was not even live yesterday. So many people tried in vain to go to Parler’s website that Alexa still registered a massive amount of traffic. Also, an obscure cellphone app named Parlor continues to be one of the most downloaded apps in America as people are confusing it with Parler.

Parler filed a major lawsuit against Amazon Web Services [AWS] yesterday alleging that the company violated antitrust laws. Twitter is one of the largest, if not the single largest customer for AWS. (The CIA is also one of its largest customers.) AWS is alleging that “Parler is unable or unwilling to police its own site.” However, they have never taken action against Twitter, which hosts large amounts of violent content.

Parler’s USA Alexa scores (based on a 30-day rolling average)

1/8: 317

1/9: 257

1/10: 216

1/11: 180

1/12: 176

The social media site Clouthub has now taken off. As recently as one week ago, CloutHub did not have impressive Alexa scores at all and even worse scores with SimilarWeb. In fact, Similarweb, which publishes data on a long delay compared to Alexa, shows CloutHub peaking last October and then going into a steep decline through November and December. On January 11th, the site had a USA Alexa score of 11,134, which was still not particularly impressive. However, this score already dropped to 5,690 for today. This is an incredible one-day movement. It is entirely possible that CloutHub received more traffic on January 11th than they did for the whole month of December. The dramatic surge in traffic to Clouthub is being largely attributed to the fact that Parler is down.

Rumble, a video-sharing site closely tied to Parler, went from a USA score of 397 yesterday, to 392 today.

BitChute, which has a large following in the USA, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and other nations, saw small improvements in all its individual scores. While Rumble has a larger US following, BitChute has a larger overall worldwide following.

MeWe went from a USA score of 692 yesterday, to 649 today. MeWe is also very popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The site looks poised to become one of the top 100 sites in Hong Kong. Their Hong Kong score went from 154 yesterday, to 145 today.

Gab went from a USA score of 677 yesterday, to 647 today.

Gab has been heavily vilified in the media for years as a hotbed of extremism. However, the website recently announced that it has archived 100 million replies Twitter users made to tweets by Donald Trump. It says that millions of those tweets contain violations of Twitter’s alleged terms of service. If Gab really is a worse hotbed of extremism than Twitter and Facebook are, then that means Twitter, Facebook, AWS, and others are directly responsible for driving millions of people from less extreme social media sites to more extreme sites.

Most downloaded free cellphone apps for January 11th. Data comes from App Annie.

Apple App Store: