Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong
tl;dr version1. The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the ‘social’ iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure.
2. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.
3. According to new data on many media sites, 69% of social referrals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.
4. Facebook and Twitter do shift the paradigm from private sharing to public publishing. They structure, archive, and monetize your publications.
The Web has always been social. Before there were social networks, there were chat rooms, BBSes, and email.
It just hasn’t been measurably social.
It all comes down to assessment. If we as a society can’t measure, track, assess and monetize something we don’t value it.
