Dark social media

[1][2] The concept of a "dark" link is generally used by people working in web analytics as well as in online advertising, who have come to expect that they will be able to monitor and profile website visitors and app users, sometimes in quite controversial ways such as mouse tracking to follow people's activities by tracking their mouse movements.

[4] Legislation such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and Digital Markets Act specifically targets this surveillance capitalism approach to providing Internet products and services.

To protect user privacy, the browser Mozilla Firefox added a feature to "Copy Without Site Tracking" for the dropdown menu when right-clicking its address bar.

He grew up in a time when the web was just being built and knew there were other ways to share information, not just through big name sites like Facebook.

Much traffic attributed to direct sources or 'unknown' comes from private sharing via messaging apps, emails, and other untraceable methods.

Brands are now focusing on using advanced tracking tools and strategies, like URL shorteners and social listening, to understand better and leverage this hidden traffic.

As a result, Dark Social is increasingly recognized as a crucial component of digital marketing that requires dedicated strategies to track and utilize effectively.

Madrigal mentioned that since October 2015, Facebook had changed their algorithm for the mobile app, which resulted in the media publisher receiving over 100% more traffic than before.

[8] Alexis Madrigal later performed an experiment to confirm his theory that the dark social traffic boost was indeed from Facebook mobile app.

Facebook, Reddit, and messaging apps boost this untracked traffic, making GBWhatsApp links harder to trace.

[8] An updated Charbeat report also confirmed that part of the Dark Social traffic was generated by Facebook mobile app and its own users.

Rules can also be made within traditional analytics tools to filter out dark social traffic that can include direct links, but exclude those that weren't referred from the homepage.

When sharing to a smaller, intimate social circle, the sharer gets to be knowledgeable within their groups, giving them street cred.

[17] Other sources of Dark Social are Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Google+, WhatsApp, Viber, Kwik, Firechat, OM and Livetext.