Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raincole 6 days ago
> The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors.

In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often?

10 comments

Yeah I think the author needs a dose of reality about how many users do anything on a site. Something that 1 in 476 visitors do isn't that bad. Especially when there's no real ongoing cost to doing so.
I didn't see any statement about normalizing the share click as bot or human.

With the continual passage of laws restricting social media for minors, URL copy and paste will become the standard methods for sharing.

Personally, I would never click the share button because sharing with a person or group of people is often through email, SMS, work chat, or here.

Businesses that use Facebook to communicate events are actively restricting their consumer base because not everyone wants to use it or will. A standard web-site is the only method to communicate openly with users.

Share buttons got a 5-7% CTR on the last social media project I built and were responsible for a huge number of inbound referrals. Lots of long tail SEO too.

If the trillion dollar tech companies have them, there's a reason.

Especially on government websites like gov.uk serve. It's not a website with cute beanie hats you'd want to share on your socials.
Yeah I find this article hilarious. Especially since maybe less than 1 in 10 visitors will actually want to share the article? So 1 in 476 is actually pretty decent usage.
For which the other 475 get saddled with a bunch of extraneous downloads and invasive tracking.
The cohort that is concerned about this almost certainly runs some sort of a blocker.
What about the cohort that would care about it if they were aware of it? Or the cohort that cares about it but doesn't know such things can be blocked?
I think it's best to leave these educational matters to tech journalists or Internet commentariat. UX is the priority.
That's beside the point. I block plenty of things personally but am no less concerned about mass tracking.
No, that's beside the point. The vast majority of users do not care about this at all, while those that do care never see it due to their blockers. From the point of someone carelessly offering a convenience feature with tracking capabilities, this is a no-brainer.
"The people who care enough about the quality of the water do tend to test it, and will refrain from drinking it if it's polluted. But the vast majority of people do not care enough to go through the hassle. So polluting that drinking water for our own interest is a no-brainer."
It seems like the number isn't very useful unless we have a baseline for how often the site is shared at all.

If 0.2% of users share the site via a direct link, and 0.2% of your users share the site via a share button, for an overall share rate of 0.4%, that probably means the share button is worth keeping around.

If you assume the that half wouldn't also share it through it other means if needed. It'd need an A/B test.

For example, mobile Chrome has built-in share buttons, no copy-paste of URLs needed, no in-page button needed.

At that rate I think you can assume most clicks were accidental.
You don't know my mother

Messages like "Hi I found this podcast episode, you should listen to it!", not fitting her usual or the chat's tone at all. The link goes to the last 19 seconds because she finished listening and the thing tries to be helpful (took me a minute, the first time, to realise she didn't actually mean to share the fragment at that timestamp). At least it matches her native language I guess, looking on the bright side (the message isn't actually in English)

A simple "copy link to episode" button would have been so much more helpful. Not just for me but also any recipients that are as tech-savvy as she is and don't understand why it doesn't show them the whole episode for example, or why it is she's implying it's so important (the template wording is just off because she didn't write it)

I'm pretty confident that my accidental click rate is much higher than one in 476, especially on touch screens, although you'd need to divide that by the total number of links on the page, to get the probability of accidentally clicking on any specific link.
> Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement.

I would have guessed clicking on ads was rare

It depends on whether or not the page finishes loading, and rearranges everything, right as you're trying to click on a link.
I work in digital marketing and I am continually shocked by the amount of people that click my disgusting ads. (nearly all advertisements are morally disgusting)
I will just naively assume that people do it accidentally or are tricked into clicking on that filth. Ignorance is bliss
Im always surprised when i see the significant opens in the promotions tab of the gmail inbox. Looks like a lot of folks want those ads.
I think they want discount codes from "sign up to our mailing list!" emails. If it's in the promotions tab, they probably never have to look at it otherwise or get bugged with notifications, but they could still have it there to check when they happen to be making a purchase anyway.

Depending on the email program, you have to open them to unsubscribe, too. But maybe your stats tool would discount opens immediately followed by unsubscribes?

And I wonder how many were bots
If you want to be a pedant, sure, you could say people do click it! But then you always have to speak in disclaimers and technicality, or you will give the wrong impression.

Most reasonable people will compare usage rate to some minimum effective threshold, under which you could basically say no one clicks the button. Even though that’s not technically true, it becomes a useful rule of thumb for how you should think about the button, and it’s easier to remember.

IMO if less than 5% of people are clicking the share button, then basically no one is clicking it.

Similarly, if more than 95% of people are clicking the button, then everyone clicks it!

> IMO if less than 5% of people are clicking the share button, then basically no one is clicking it.

It's a crazy take and honestly just lack of sense over numbers. 5% is really high for something that the users have to actively do, even it's just a single button.

MrBeast's videos have a like:view ratio less than 5%. Your take is saying that basically no one is clicking likes on MrBeast's videos.

What definition of “often” includes a 0.21% rate?
The term "often" wouldn't relate to the overall rate, but to the frequency. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, it happened about once every 7 minutes.
Try to affect human behavior at scale in any way and you pray for an effect size like that
> In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often?

And thats for gov.uk sites - they're websites where you mostly go to do something rather than browse for interesting content. I'd guess social media, local news and sites with cat videos would get more shares.

No, a 1 in 500 rate is not often at all.