Parler, Newsmax, and OANN App Downloads Tumble After November Spike
By: Sarah Emerson
Tags: Social Media, Facebook, Culture, Tech, Platform

Parler, Newsmax, and OANN App Downloads Tumble After November Spike

But many of the apps report consistent gains in engagement

Photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

Following the November election, millions of Trump supporters claimed to have jumped ship for “free speech” platforms after Facebook removed several large conservative groups. These alternative apps—Parler, MeWe, Rumble, and those of far-right media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN)—reported massive spikes in user growth throughout November. Now that momentum has stalled, with, for example, almost nine times fewer daily Newsmax app downloads in December than in November.

Data from analytics company Apptopia suggests that the surge was temporary, and each platform has witnessed a precipitous drop in app downloads since the middle of November. The trend speaks to the challenges of fringe communities to establish their own ecosystems online as they are increasingly pushed out of more moderated mainstream platforms. It also puts into question the viability of platforms like Parler, which proudly bills itself as the “premier free speech social network.” According to a recent OneZero story, some of Parler’s new users seem disenchanted with the platform.

Much of the migration toward these platforms was seemingly sparked by Facebook removing a 300,000-person “Stop the Steal” group on November 5. Within a week, both Parler, a Twitter clone, and MeWe, which resembles Facebook, had rocketed to the top of app stores. Parler claimed its user base doubled to more than 10 million members in that time, and the app saw nearly 1 million downloads between November 3 and November 8, Fast Company reported.

According to a recent CNN Business report, which also drew data from Apptopia, Parler was downloaded 16,000 times on October 25. After soaring to 340,000 downloads by mid-November, by the second week of December Parler downloads had fallen to barely more than double pre-election figures, or 39,800 downloads.

MeWe witnessed an almost identical trajectory, jumping from 12,000 downloads pre-election to 207,000 by mid-November and back down to 30,000 downloads come mid-December.

While downloads crested, Apptopia’s numbers suggest that people have increasingly engaged with both apps over the past two months. Each experienced a growth in global daily active users, which measures the number of unique visitors to an app and is a metric used to infer a platform’s longevity.

By mid-November, Parler had doubled its daily active users from October to nearly 2,000,000. MeWe achieved the same, doubling its own figures to 968,000 daily active users. On Tuesday, those numbers had risen even higher to roughly 2,500,000 and 1,580,000, respectively. (Facebook, by comparison, reported 196 million daily active users in the United States and Canada alone this year.)

The drop-off in downloads of video-hosting platform Rumble has been less severe. In late October, the app counted just over 14,000 daily downloads, which jumped to about 68,000 in mid-November before falling back down to 49,000 on Tuesday. While Rumble doesn’t create original content like Newsmax and OANN, its “hands-off” moderation approach has made it appealing to conservative influencers like Dan Bongino, who owns an equity stake in the company.

Downloads of the apps for news platforms Newsmax and OANN have seen a more severe drop-off. In late October, daily downloads for both apps stood at around 4,000. Those numbers rose to roughly 230,000 and 72,000, respectively, in mid-October, and settled at about 32,000 and 16,000 on Tuesday.

Like Parler and MeWe, all three video platforms have upped their number of daily active users compared to October. Newsmax counted more than 2 million daily users on Tuesday, Rumble had just under 600,000, and OANN had about 630,000.

While each app is clocking fewer additional downloads now than in November, Rumble, Newsmax, and OANN have nevertheless increased their daily downloads since late October. This lingering popularity could be attributed to President Trump, who has personally endorsed Newsmax and OANN as Fox News competitors.