Dark Social Sharing By Age, October 2014 [TABLE]

There’s been plenty of chatter over the past few years about the effects of social sharing, and as the social audience continues to grow, this won’t stop any time soon. eMarketer expects the number of social users worldwide to rise 12.5% this year, reaching 1.8 billion, or 63.4% of internet users and 25.0% of the global population.

But what about online sharing beyond social? An October 2014 study by real-time bidding digital advertising platform RadiumOne looked at dark social sharing—when people copy and paste content or links from a website into a private message such as an email or text and share it with their connections—and found that it was bigger than the buzz it gets. Nearly 85% of internet users worldwide said they shared content online. More than nine in 10 respondents in that group used dark social channels—a percentage relatively consistent across age groups—and 32% only shared via dark social.

Dark social sharing can give even better insight into consumers’ interests and preferences, as they likely share what really matters to them with specific connections who also care about or are interested in a topic. In other words, it’s more personal. Read the rest at eMarketer.