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By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from "Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If so, well, that
by aw3c2 14y ago
By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from "Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If so, well, that is called the "Internet". It uses hyperlinks to send people between pages on it.
- Semaphor 14y agoNo, any link with no set referrer. That exactly not stuff from other pages.
- papsosouid 14y agoNo, it is any inbound link to a page unlikely to be typed manually "blah.com/articles/random/crap/article-title-goes-here/35487623", that has no referrer header at all. Traffic coming from other websites will still have referrer headers, just traffic from email, IM, etc don't.
- kzahel 14y agoI believe any referral traffic from an https:// https:// site will NOT send the referrer header. It does not seem like the article is taking that into account.
- papsosouid 14y agoHe did mention that, but of course there's no way to figure out how much of that traffic is from https referrals. Of course, I wouldn't be shocked if 90%+ of https referrals are from gmail, which would put it right back to what he is assuming: email, IM, etc.
- Tipzntrix 14y agoYou make a pretty good point, but not just gmail. Pretty much all -mail providers use https when users access their web interface.
- roc 14y agoThat's the point. I think we can all agree that site owners are interested in "social networking" as the mechanism by which their content is shared and discovered by people passing links around. Essentially, the propagation of "word of mouth". But they've been tracking data based on a definition of "social networking" that only includes the big social networking sites. And that when they broaden the definition to "this traffic is the likely result of social networking" to "someone has directly requested a deep link without referrer data", they see that even the sum of traffic from all those huge sites is just the tip of the iceberg. Which comports what we all already know. Which is that Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/et al didn't invent any new social behaviors. They just aggregated large chunks of them.