Comments for Yuli Patrick Hsieh

Comment on Reflection on the Dark Social by Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:08:07 +0000

I see your point and I would suspect that you are right about the total traffic, Stacy . However, we need to think how more difficult would it be to copy the link and paste somewhere to share with your friends than clicking the FB share button on sites. We also need to think whether the benefits of keeping your privacy from social media may outweigh such an additional cost. I would suspect that much of the Dark Social traffic may be the result of the privacy concern. If this is really the case, then it means that people share things even more actively then we know, and the overall traffic may not necessarily drop much even without social media.

Comment on Reflection on the Dark Social by Stacy

Stacy — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:06:32 +0000

Hey Patrick, what I mean is one post to a social site can generate many cut and pastes of the link. This is hard to explain but his idea that because none of the Dark social click-throughs can be directly accounted for means that social media had NO role in their occurring. I think that’s wrong. My point, to put it another way, is that If there were no social media shares of the site, overall site traffic would drop significantly (not just the X% of clicks that FB gets but also an X proportion of the Dark social). I think he underestimates the role of social sites in the distribution of individual page links. So yes, by necessity the Dark social clicks would increase but overall site traffic would decrease. In a big way.

Comment on Reflection on the Dark Social by Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:04:56 +0000

In my original example, none of the shares were captured, which will be what happens if there is no social media sharing features on the Atlantic. In your revised example, the part that you shared with me is captured when I clicked the link that you posted, the latter part of emailing and IMing is not. So, if you took all the social sharing features off all the stories on the Atlantic (made it harder for people to share on FB and Twitter, etc.), then I think the Dark Social will become LARGER because we lost the referrer metadata and thus we have less information about the number of shares of these articles.

Comment on Reflection on the Dark Social by Stacy

Stacy — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 00:01:29 +0000

Couple things: 1. This guy seems to put too much emphasis on sharing links as the purpose of the social web. From his perspective, it’s the most important thing because he wants traffic. And I get that, I used to be that person for a media company too. But, sharing links is only 1 facet of social media use for many users. So, when we study Twitter, FB we’re not just studying information flows. If that’s all we did, everyone would be SNA people and we’d call it a day. Clearly, there’s more to it than that. 2. I hate to rain on his parade, but using your example Patrick, let’s flip it and say that you first saw the article because I posted it on FB and THEN you emailed/IM’d it to your friends. The point is, I would bet that if you took all the social sharing features off all the stories on the Atlantic (made it harder for people to share on FB and Twitter, etc.) that a significant drop in “Dark Social” would occur as a result. His error here is that in thinking because there is a metric for particular sites, it’s the only measure of their influence. He’s dead wrong.