Why does original and in-depth reporting on the Iran war by The New York Times receive less engagement on X than pictures of pets posted by a man who goes by Catturd?
An observation by a prominent analyst last week has reinvigorated the debate about how platforms treat publishers, and how this affects public discourse.
In the wake of the post, Nieman Lab published new data that showed how X disadvantages content that directs users out of the platform.
The study, published on 8 April, analysed the 200 most recent posts from 18 large publishers on X, comparing engagement (likes, replies and reposts) across different posting styles. Among the outlets examined were major paywalled publishers including Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, alongside non-paywalled organisations such as the BBC, Reuters and Fox News.
The results point to a clear pattern; publishers that rely heavily on links tend to see significantly lower engagement than accounts that prioritise native content.
The New York Times, which has more than 50 million followers, included links in 88% of posts in the sample and recorded a median of 383 engagements per post. CNN, with more than 60 million followers, linked out in 90% of posts, while The Wall Street Journal did so in 98%.
By contrast, Globe Eye News, a smaller aggregation account with fewer than one million followers, did not include links in any of the posts analysed and recorded a median of 8,418 engagements — more than 20 times that of the Times.
Fox News stood out among traditional news organisations. Despite having nearly 30 million followers, it included links in just 9% of posts, relying instead on video and image-led content. That approach appeared to translate into stronger performance. But reduced reliance on links alone did not guarantee success, for example The Daily Wire, which included links in just 27% of posts, still recorded relatively modest engagement.
The findings broadly align with a separate large-scale study by social media management tool Buffer, which analysed 18.8 million posts from 71,000 X accounts. That study concluded that ‘links really do hurt performance’, with link posts consistently generating the lowest engagement rates across both standard and premium accounts.
According to Buffer’s data, link posts on regular accounts generated effectively no engagement on average, compared with roughly 0.4% for text posts, 0.2% for image posts and 0.25% for video. Among premium accounts, engagement increased across all formats, but link posts still lagged significantly behind, with text and video performing best.
The renewed focus on link performance was triggered by a public debate between analyst Nate Silver and Nikita Bier, X’s head of product.
In an article published earlier this month, Silver argued that the platform has become increasingly unfriendly to outbound traffic. ‘Links to external websites are substantially punished,’ he wrote, adding that even accounts with millions of followers can struggle to generate engagement on posts that direct users away from X.
He also pointed to a broader shift in the platform’s culture and incentives, arguing that content optimised for in-feed engagement now dominates, sometimes at the expense of higher-quality information. Citing analysis from writer Kyle Tharp showing that 74 of the 100 most-viewed X accounts lean conservative, Silver noted that users such as ‘Catturd’, who has a warm relationship with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, received generate significantly more engagement than established news organisations like the New York Times.
But Bier has rejected that characterisation. In a series of posts responding to Silver, he suggested that outlets such as the New York Times rely too heavily on posting large volumes of headlines giving users little reason to click. Bier claimed that link clicks are higher than they’ve ever been, and that publishers need to just ‘post the link in the body of the post and provide sufficient context about what the user will see before they click it.’
In a separate post, Bier said: ‘[The] NYT has not experimented with their captions on posts in 20 years since the launch of Twitter. While the entire world has evolved their posting style to convert people to their newsletters (e.g., threads, etc), NYT still has their social media manager phoning it in: bulk posting 100 links per day with 1-sentence captions.’
His position has been echoed by Musk, who previously suggested that users should place links in replies rather than in the main post to avoid what he described as ‘lazy linking’.
The issue is not new, and it is not limited to X. Musk, in his typically brash way, gives a good insight into the thinking for most tech moguls that users must be kept within their walled gardens at all costs. Meta has tested limits on how frequently some accounts can post links on Facebook, while creators on TikTok have reported lower engagement on videos directing users to external sites. Similar tactics are widely used on LinkedIn, where publishers often place links in comments rather than posts.
But the Silver-Bier debate has brought the issue to the fore again, and at a time when AI-generated summaries are also throttling traffic to websites by lessening the need for users to click on articles.
It’s a useful reminder of the pincer attack being carried out on publishers on the open web, and how a handful of platforms have control over the information that large swathes of the public see and consume.