alt Hacker News> 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?
Replies
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.
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.
At that rate I think you can assume most clicks were accidental.
> Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement.
I would have guessed clicking on ads was rare
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!
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.