Facebook’s dominance is greater than we thought
So-called “dark social” traffic turns out to be mostly Facebook
Dark social is traffic that is difficult to account for because analytics tools do not report where it comes from.
Initially the leading hypothesis was that this traffic was coming from email.
However, recent data suggests that the majority of dark social traffic is in fact coming from Facebook. This makes Facebook even more frighteningly dominant than was previously realised.
The takeaway is this: if you’re a media company, you are almost certainly underestimating your Facebook traffic. The only question is how much Facebook traffic you’re not counting. The bad news is that, if you didn’t know before, it should be even more clear now: Facebook owns web media distribution.