Data analysis: How much traffic will be lost without the boost from PTT's Gossiping board? Are SETN and Mnews facing a traffic winter?

On July 30, 2026, the moderator of PTT's Gossiping board announced a ban on links from SETN and Mnews. SETN was accused of publishing an unverified, sensationalized report involving a homicide case, and failed to properly correct it despite protests from the victim's family; Mnews received an even harsher penalty due to a dispute over inaccurate reporting related to Korea. The moderator stated bluntly: "The law can't touch you, but the board rules can." This move immediately sparked a polarized debate across social media over media literacy and speech censorship.

Since the incident, many people have been discussing the current predicament facing Taiwan's media outlets.

When it comes to driving traffic from PTT, Dcard, and Meta-related communities (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), the latter two currently have their own limitations, while PTT is the forum most able to directly feed traffic to media outlets. This lets us examine what kind of consequences this ban will actually trigger. To cut to the conclusion: on the surface, PTT's Gossiping board banning SETN and Mnews might look like just a few million fewer clicks per month, but in reality, this severs one of the most important "SEO moats" and "high-stickiness traffic pools" that these two outlets have in Taiwan's internet ecosystem.

Let's first look at the cold hard numbers. If PTT's Gossiping board truly imposes a full ban on links to these two outlets' domains, SETN would directly lose an average of about 3.08 million clicks per month, accounting for 17.5% of its average monthly total traffic; Mnews would lose about 910,000 clicks, accounting for 8.0% of its average monthly total traffic. In other words, one out of every six clicks to SETN comes from PTT, while for Mnews it's one out of every twelve. This is not traffic you can dismiss as marginal—it's a stable, important channel within each outlet's monthly traffic structure, and the moment the ban takes effect, it drops to zero instantly. In today's environment of shifting traffic referral channels, this is no small blow. But if you think this is just a matter of losing a few million page views per month, the consequences could actually be far more serious than you'd expect. We need to zoom out and look at what's happening in the current web traffic ecosystem:

First, PTT has never been, and should never be viewed as, a single traffic source. Within Taiwan's internet environment, PTT has countless "shadow clones." The moment an article is posted on the Gossiping board, it gets immediately scraped by countless crawler and mirror sites like Disp BBS and PTT Web. What does this mean? It means that a single simple URL share instantly generates dozens of "backlinks" from high-authority sites for that news website. In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), this is essentially a gift from heaven. When the Gossiping board bans sharing their links, this automatically running SEO backlink-generating machine gets completely shut off. Over time, these two outlets' rankings in Google search results will inevitably take a serious hit.

Even more critical is that we're now entering the era of AI search (AEO, AI Engine Optimization). Whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Manus, these AI tools rely heavily on forum discussion volume when judging a news article's authority and popularity. When your news links can no longer be discussed or cited on Taiwan's most influential forum, AI will conclude that your content "isn't worth discussing." This is an extremely dangerous warning sign for future traffic strategy.

So, can they make up this gap with today's hottest social platforms? It's difficult.

Let's look at Meta (Facebook and Instagram). Anyone familiar with social media operations knows that Meta's current algorithm has just one core logic: keep users locked firmly on their own platform. They intensely dislike sending traffic away to external sites. You write an in-depth, great article, attach a news link, and your reach instantly gets slashed to the bone. Media social media managers now have to play cat-and-mouse games like putting links in the comments. So counting on Meta alone to fill this 4-million gap in traffic? That's an unrealistic fantasy—not to mention that even if outlets pay out of pocket for social media ads to acquire customers, the return ratio from exposure and clicks relative to content investment is no longer what it used to be.

What about Threads, which has been quite popular lately? Here we need to expose a blind spot in the data. If you only look at web-based traffic analysis tools (like SimilarWeb), you might think Threads' traffic in Taiwan is pitifully low, even collapsing dramatically. But in fact, from the start of its service until now, Threads has become a "purely app-driven" platform, and the web version's data is essentially just an afterimage.

The real situation is this: Threads' global app monthly active users (MAU) keeps climbing, and Taiwan is actually one of Threads' biggest strongholds globally, with a traffic contribution as high as 21.83%, ranking first in the world [2]. If we back-calculate this ratio, Threads' app MAU scale in Taiwan has already surpassed 100 million (this includes a large amount of cross-device and non-logged-in browsing), far exceeding the web-based traffic of both Dcard and PTT, and also surpassing both of their app MAUs (though this figure is only an estimate, with no exact numbers available).

However, while Threads' traffic really is astonishingly large, for media outlets this is a poisoned apple that "looks good but can't be eaten." Threads is essentially a highly anonymous, emotionally charged, closed text-based community. People are used to taking screenshots there, venting emotions, and getting into arguments—but they simply "don't click links." It's an excellent venue for brand exposure, but as a traffic referral tool, its conversion rate is pitifully low. Trying to use Threads to drive people back to a news website? That's nearly mission impossible.

And under Threads' aggressive rise, Dcard isn't having an easy time either. Although Dcard's web traffic looks relatively stable (holding steady at around 40 million monthly visits on average), Dcard is also a platform highly dependent on its app. According to real data disclosed by Dcard's internal creators, their app-side article reach has plummeted from a past average of 10,000 views to under 3,000, a drop of more than 70% 3. Young users' attention is being massively drawn away by Threads.

In contrast, PTT, this veteran forum, has demonstrated remarkable resilience. Because PTT itself has no official app, a large number of users rely on the web version or third-party open-source apps to access it, so its web traffic can better reflect its true strength. Data shows that PTT continues to maintain a stable average of 41 million monthly visits from Taiwan [4].

Even more critical is "stickiness." PTT's bounce rate is only 40.9%, far lower than Dcard's 52.4% and Threads' web version's 73.4% [4]. PTT users view an average of 9.4 pages per visit, stay for over 7 minutes on average, and each user returns an average of 8.4 times per month—nearly double Dcard's rate. This shows that PTT's users not only generate high traffic volume, but are genuinely "high-value users" who actually stay to read content and click links.

This is the predicament these two outlets are about to face. Based on past operational experience, we know PTT's traffic characteristics very well: it's not a one-time firework, but a spark that keeps smoldering. A news story that gets "pushed to the top" on the Gossiping board often triggers follow-up coverage from other media outlets, and can even become material for evening political talk shows, creating powerful secondary and tertiary spread. Ultimately, this shapes the scope of online discussion and becomes material referenced by various types of creators, in turn transforming into all kinds of digital content on other platforms.

When this spark is extinguished, and with Meta not giving out traffic, Threads unable to drive traffic out, Dcard's app-side traffic quietly bleeding, and the highly sticky PTT now banned—caught in this four-way squeeze—the cost of acquiring traffic for these two outlets will surge dramatically going forward. They may have to rely even more heavily on LINE official account push notifications, or pray for the favor of Google Discover's algorithm. This isn't just a matter of losing 3 million or nearly 1 million clicks per month—it's a crisis of the entire content distribution chain breaking apart. In an era where traffic is becoming increasingly expensive, losing a free channel that automatically does SEO for you, generates buzz, and brings in highly sticky users is undoubtedly a heavy, silent blow.

References

1 SimilarWeb traffic data analysis: PTT referral statistics from January to June 2026 2 Yahoo News Taiwan (2025). Taiwan becomes the world's biggest fan of Threads! Traffic contribution reaches 21.83%.3 Threads Creator Disclosure (2025). Dcard's traffic has dropped severely, possibly to only about 30% of its original level. 4 SimilarWeb Traffic Analytics (2026). Web traffic and engagement statistics for PTT, Dcard, and Threads.