ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot launched in November, saw monthly traffic to its website and unique visitors decline for the first time ever in June, according to analytics firm Similarweb and netizens had an array of reasons for this decline.
Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT website decreased by 9.7% in June from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT's website dropped 5.7%. The amount of time visitors spent on the website was also down 8.5%, the data shows.
ChatGPT gained immense popularity since its launch in November, with users leveraging its generative AI capabilities for various tasks such as writing and coding. The chatbot quickly reached 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever.
Currently, ChatGPT boasts over 1.5 billion monthly visits, placing it among the top 20 websites worldwide. It has even surpassed Microsoft's search engine, Bing, which utilises OpenAI's technology.
Meanwhile, after the report by Similarweb, netizens were divided over the possible reasons for the drop in monthly traffic and unique visitors on ChatGPT. Some said that the AI bubble is bursting while some suggested that it is related to the end of semesters.
One user wrote, “It’s called summer. The school is over. Students are offline.”
Some people also highlighted the reason for the decline in the monthly users could be attributed to censorship on the platform related to certain topics and holding back the majority of computation power by OpenAI.
Another user highlighted that the decline is related to what the model of ChatGPT enables its user to view. “Google Books permits searching full text, but will only return excerpts. This was determined to constitute fair use. Similarly, Open AI’s ChatGPT will decline to provide more than excerpts,” one Twitter user wrote while comparing the answers from Google’s Bard and ChatGPT to a similar question.
The emergence of competitors like Google's Bard chatbot, launched in recent months, could have also impacted ChatGPT's growth. Furthermore, the release of the ChatGPT app on iOS in May might have diverted some traffic away from the website.
The recent slowdown in growth may have a silver lining in terms of cost control for running ChatGPT. The chatbot requires substantial computing power to handle user queries, which OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, described as "eye-watering" in terms of expense.
While ChatGPT is free to use, it also offers a premium subscription that provides access to OpenAI's more advanced model, GPT-4, for a monthly fee of $20. Estimates from YipitData suggest that over half a million users have subscribed to the premium offering.
OpenAI has projected revenue of $200 million for this year. In addition to ChatGPT, the company generates income by selling API access to its AI models directly to developers and enterprises, as well as through its partnership with Microsoft, which has invested over $10 billion into the company.