Kanye West Eyes Parler as Traffic Tanks
By Ade D. Adeniji, October 17, 2022
Parler, the social media platform that found success as a haven for conservative refugees fleeing mainstream outlets (including Donald Trump after Twitter gave him the boot), made news today when it announced that billionaire rapper Kanye West would acquire it for an undisclosed sum. “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said West, now known as Ye, in a statement released by Parler.
But Parler’s celebration of its “future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome,” as the statement put it, ignores its recent decline.
Parler started strong, to be sure. Its app was installed nearly 5 million times in November 2020 alone, according to data from SensorTower – outpacing giants like Twitter, which was installed about 2.2 million times over the same period. And according to data that TheRighting curated from Comscore, Parler.com’s audience grew 1,659% from April 2020 to October 2020, with some 2 million unique visitors that month.
Less than a year later, however, in August 2021, the website attracted 766,000 unique visitors. And in August 2022, only 137,000 unique visitors hit the site, per audience data from Comscore, a drop of 82%. Parler has not yet responded to The Righting’s request for comment.
No Trump? No Good
So what accounts for the change?
“Certainly being kicked off an app store doesn’t help,” said Katie Harbath, who spent a decade as a public policy director at Facebook. Shortly after the Jan 6 insurrection, Parler was banned from Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. It was reinstated on the App Store four months later. And just last month, the Parler app finally reemerged on Google Play Store.
A Google spokesman told the New York Times that Parler had significantly increased its content moderation since the beginning of 2021. But when an app that promotes an anything goes culture gets defanged, loyalists may no longer be drawn to it. “The reason Parler fell off is because they only had one rule. And their rule was that there were no rules,” said David Castain, a marketing and social media expert whose clients include Uber and Chipotle.
Another factor – Parler is no longer the only “alt tech” act in town. Trump’s own Truth Social, founded in October 2021, grew from 1.9 million unique visits in June 2022 to 4 million unique visits in August, per Comscore audience data. Other sites like Gettr, MeWe, and Rumble are also players in the field.
“There are so many other options right now,” Castain said. “Most people came to Parler because of Donald Trump. So if he has his own social media platform, that essentially split the users.”
A Foggy Future
Harbath, founder of the tech policy shop Anchor Change, thinks that Parler failed to focus on growth tactics. A key for the platform going forward will be how many candidates and big name influencers it can court. “Overall, I think the people running that platform don’t understand the amount of effort you have to put in to try to keep people coming back, whether that’s having influencers, celebrities, folks that are creating content,” Harbath said. “But there’s also all the design options and nudges a lot of us hate, but that are really central when you have a newer platform.”
With nearly 50 million followers on Instagram and Twitter combined, Ye, worth $2 billion, might be just the one to reignite Parler. But Harbath said it’s a too early to tell. “The big question is if Kanye’s celebrity is enough of a draw that people want to be on the platform to hear what he has to say. And does he draw in other celebs?”
And, of course, with Ye’s celebrity comes Ye’s controversy. In just the past few weeks, he’s managed to trumpet antisemetic conspiracy theories, don a White Lives Matter t-shirt with Candace Owens, and propagate a long-debunked myth that it was fentanyl, not being suffocated by cop Derek Chauvin’s knee, that killed George Floyd. In response, Floyd’s family is reportedly considering a lawsuit.
In other words, Ye’s short term bailout might cause greater problems down the line. “It’s also a question if they [Parler] would lose app store access again,” Harbath added.
In August, Parler launched an Ambassador Program aimed at “amplifying the voices of younger content creators.” Chandler Crump, a teenage hip hop artist and conservative commentator, has been a Parler user since its 2018 founding: “I joined Parler because free speech has always been a very paramount issue to me even before censorship was as bad as it is now,” Crump writes in a Parler blog.
It remains to be seen if the combination of Ye and young figures like Crump will be enough to move the needle for Parler.
Ade D. Adeniji is a Staff Writer for Inside Philanthropy and an approved Rotten Tomatoes critic. He’s also written for outlets CBS News, WIRED, Newsweek, PBS, Mic, and The Rumpus, and blogs about film, television, and the majestic NBA on his own website, adeadeniji.com. Twitter: @derekadeniji
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Parler has lost almost all of its traffic since January 2021 when it generated more than 12 million unique visitors. In August 2022, which was the most recent analysis of unique visitors to the conservative-friendly social platform, Parler attracted only 137,000 unique visitors.
