by muhammad Saleem.

back in march when usa today decided to embrace social media functionality, the response was all but good. some said bravo, others wondered if it would work, but 92 percent just didn’t like it. a month later it appeared that the news site had proven everyone wrong. the changes paid off with a massive 380 percent increase in new user registrations, a 21 percent increase in unique visitors, and over 40,000 new comments posted to the site in the month since the changes.

four months later, it seems that the spike was short-lived and that the social experiment is not working after all.

Here’s the Compete.com data, showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors.

Comscore also shows a decline, although a smaller one. March unique visitors were 7.3 million; June was 6.3 million – a 14% drop. Total pageviews were 70 million in March v. 59 million in June – a 16% drop.

while neither of these measurements is completely accurate, they do show that the initial increased activity was a short-term effect and not a long-term trend.