How People Share Content Online and With Whom?
A recent study done by AOL and Neilsen offers interesting insights into how people share content on the web and what kind of content do they prefer sharing. — Email is still the most preferred mode for sharing content with friends and family …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen has been tracking this shift since at least October 2009, when it framed social media as a gateway for content discovery, and Facebook was already wiring email into its photo- and video-sharing flows by mid-2009. The new AOL-Nielsen study cuts against the assumption that public networks had absorbed sharing outright: email still ranks as the most preferred channel for passing content to friends and family.
For AOL, the study lands mid-restructuring of its content business — Arianna Huffington's group is scaling Patch with thousands of bloggers while consolidating sites like Download Squad — so a research partnership with Nielsen doubles as brand-building for an AOL positioning itself around content rather than dial-up.
First-order effects
- Publishers and marketers reading the study get a data-backed reason to keep email share options prominent alongside social buttons, since the closest-circle sharing they most want happens off the public feeds.
- AOL gains a credible research franchise at the moment its editorial operation is under scrutiny over unpaid-blogger practices, giving the Huffington Post Media Group a measurement story to point to.
Second-order effects
- Social platforms competing for share traffic — where Nielsen's own 2010 report showed Twitter out-clicking Facebook — face pressure to integrate or interoperate with email rather than treat it as a rival channel.
- Analytics vendors and ad buyers have to price two distinct sharing behaviors: trackable public posts versus private email passes that standard social metrics never see.
Third-order effects
- If private-channel sharing stays dominant for close ties, attribution models built on visible social signals will systematically undercount word-of-mouth, pushing the industry toward measurement of what happens behind logins and inboxes.
- Content strategy bifurcates structurally: public-network optimization for discovery on one side, email-centric mechanics for trusted recommendation on the other — a split every publisher's product team now has to staff for.
The trend: Online sharing is splitting into two measurable tiers — public network posts for reach and private email exchanges for trust — and the measurement industry is only equipped to see half of it.