Analysis of multiple studies shows that social sharing buttons are rarely clicked (about 0.2% of visitors). Users instead copy and paste URLs, making 'dark social' a major traffic source.
# Nobody clicks your share buttons — Ankur Sethi
Source: [https://ankursethi.com/links/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/](https://ankursethi.com/links/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/)
15 Jun 2026 at 10:50PM ISTderekhanson\.blog[Permalink](https://ankursethi.com/links/nobody-clicks-your-share-buttons/)
\(Via[rendezvous with cassidoo](https://buttondown.com/cassidoo/archive/u1f69a-innovation-comes-out-of-great-human/)\.\)
I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and \(some\) WordPress blogs\.
[Derek Hanson digs into the numbers](https://derekhanson.blog/):
> The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this\. When GOV\.UK added social sharing buttons, they[tracked usage for 10 weeks](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/)across 6\.8 million pageviews\. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times\. That’s a 0\.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors\. The most telling part: the feature sat in their backlog for ages because zero end users had ever requested it\. In their user testing, people just copied and pasted links\. Moovweb found the same thing when they[analyzed 61 million mobile sessions](https://www.localrobot.com/do-people-actually-click-social-sharing-buttons/)\. Only 0\.2% of mobile users interacted with social sharing at all\. Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement\. Luke Wroblewski, the interaction designer and author,[crowdsourced data from his readers](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/social-share-buttons/)and landed on an average of 0\.25% across 18 million pageviews\. Different organizations, different audiences, same number\.
What do people do instead? They copy and paste URLs or use the share button in their browser\.
> In 2012, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic noticed[a huge chunk of the magazine’s web traffic](https://builtin.com/articles/dark-social)showing up as “direct” in Google Analytics\. Those visitors weren’t typing URLs or using bookmarks\. They were clicking links that someone had pasted into a text thread, an email chain, a Slack channel\.
This reflects my own experience\. "Direct/none" is the number one referrer on this very website\.
LinkedIn's AI slop button, which lets users flag AI-generated posts, has been clicked over a million times, contributing to a 40% reduction in views on such content.
A Stanford study analyzing billions of social media posts reveals that only ~3% of users generate severely toxic content, but engagement-driven algorithms disproportionately amplify this minority, distorting public perception and driving self-censorship among the majority.