Word.ws English Dictionary

dark social

dark social noun: interactions via the World Wide Web that cannot be publicly viewed, tracked or logged, such as private messages, texts and e-mails.

Noun

dark social (uncountable)

  1. (Internet) Interactions via the World Wide Web that cannot be publicly viewed, tracked or logged, such as private messages, texts and e-mails.
    • This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL [author's capitalsation]. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or...[2012 October 12, Alexis C. Madrigal, “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong”, in The Atlantic
    • According to a RadiumOne study, almost 70% of all online referrals come from dark social globally. For the UK, this figure increases to 75%.2016 February 16, Jack Simpson, “The rise of dark social: Everything you need to know”, in Econsultancy

Examples of dark social in a sentence

  • I call it DARK SOCIAL [author's capitalsation].[2012 October 12, Alexis C. Madrigal, “Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong”, in The Atlantic:
  • This shift in consumer behaviour underlines how much marketing now comes through social media, and specifically dark social.2019 March 25, John Glenday, quoting André van Loon, “63% of people prefer to share content on 'dark social' channels”, in The Drum:
  • Dark social has a profound impact on social and digital marketing strategies.2023 August 18, Rebecca Kowalewicz, “Understanding And Utilizing Dark Social In Marketing”, in Forbes:

Origin of dark social

From dark (“hidden, secret”) + social (“relating to social media or social networks”); compare Dark Web (“the portion of the Deep Web hosted on restricted networks”). Coined 12 October 2012 by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic (see quotations), in reference to Internet traffic (clicks) from hyperlinks sent via private messages that are thus invisible to most analytics programs.

Questions about dark social

What does dark social mean?
Dark social means interactions via the World Wide Web that cannot be publicly viewed, tracked or logged, such as private messages, texts and e-mails.
How do you use dark social in a sentence?
I call it DARK SOCIAL [author's capitalsation].
What part of speech is dark social?
Dark social is a noun.

Words near dark social in the dictionary

  1. dark sides
  2. dark sleeper
  3. dark sleepers
  4. dark slide
  5. dark slides
  6. dark social
  7. dark soliton
  8. dark solitons
  9. dark space
  10. dark spaces
  11. dark spinach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dark social (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-dark social.wav.

Cite this entry: “dark social.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dark_social. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.