ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular language model, experienced a decline in website traffic and unique visitors in the month of June, marking its first-ever decrease since its launch in November. Analytics firm Similarweb reported a 9.7% decrease in worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website compared to May, along with a 5.7% drop in unique visitors. Visitors also spent 8.5% less time on the website.
ChatGPT made a significant impact when it entered the market, captivating users with its ability to assist in everyday tasks like writing and coding. In just two months after its launch, it achieved the impressive milestone of 100 million monthly active users. At that time, it became one of the top 20 websites globally with over 1.5 billion monthly visits, surpassing Microsoft’s Bing search engine utilizing OpenAI’s technology.
However, recent months have seen the emergence of several competitors to ChatGPT, including Google’s Bard chatbot. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, also offers a chatbot powered by OpenAI to users for free. The explosive growth of ChatGPT from zero to 100 million users might have caused some growing pains, leading to decreased accuracy and the need for adjustments in training the model. Regulatory implications may have also influenced its performance.
Additionally, the launch of the ChatGPT app on iOS in May could have contributed to the decrease in website traffic as users opted for the app instead. The summer break for schools was also mentioned as a possible factor, with fewer students seeking assistance with their homework during this vacation period.
Despite the slowdown in growth, ChatGPT remains popular, with over 17 million iOS downloads globally as of July 4th. According to data.ai, downloads peaked on May 31st and have consistently remained high, especially in the United States, with an average of 530,000 downloads per week in the first six weeks of availability.
The recent slowdown in growth may actually benefit OpenAI financially, as running ChatGPT is an expensive endeavor due to the significant computing power required to process user queries. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, previously described the cost of the service as eye-watering.
While ChatGPT is free to use, OpenAI also offers a premium subscription for $20 per month, granting users access to the more advanced GPT-4 model. According to estimates from YipitData, approximately 1.5 million people in the US have signed up for this subscription.
Despite the challenges and declining website traffic, the ChatGPT platform remains a powerful tool loved by users around the world. OpenAI will likely make the necessary adjustments to improve and sustain its performance in the increasingly competitive landscape of language models and chatbots.
