Saturday, February 23, 2013

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

And then one day, we had a meeting with the real-time web analytics firm, Chartbeat. Like many media nerds, I love Chartbeat. It lets you know exactly what's happening with your stories, most especially where your readers are coming from. Recently, they made an accounting change that they showed to us. They took visitors who showed up without referrer data and split them into two categories. The first was people who were going to a homepage (theatlantic.com) or a subject landing page (theatlantic.com/politics). The second were people going to any other page, that is to say, all of our articles. These people, they figured, were following some sort of link because no one actually types "http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/atlast-the-gargantuan-telescope-designed-to-find-life-on-other-planets/263409/." They started counting these people as what they call direct social. 

The second I saw this measure, my heart actually leapt (yes, I am that much of a data nerd). This was it! They'd found a way to quantify dark social, even if they'd given it a lamer name! 

On the first day I saw it, this is how big of an impact dark social was having on The Atlantic. 

darksocial_atlantic.jpg
Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They're about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that's delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It's more than 2.5x Facebook's impact on the site.

Thw web is strongly Iv-B and Oy-R because of its root and branch structure, following these connections then is difficult. The more social V-Bi and Y-Ro social media is small like plants sprouting fast with few leaves yet. Often this chaotic part of the web is deceptive, people using false names and misrepresenting themselves.

This is then a V-Bi and Iv-B disconnect because of the weak policing on the web.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.