Shedding some light on "dark social"

[vikrum]

This is a pretty cursory look into some other possiblities of refererless traffic. Given an ordinary browsing session or interaction from an end user, what else could be leading to HTTP requests without the referer header?

[asparagui]

1) proxies

2) clever antivirus/firewall software

3) htaccess tricks will often drop headers

4) javascript

5) things like amazon silk

6) people spoofing things to make their browser work

7) anonymizer services

8) proxies

[tmarthal]

11) There used to be an issue in select browsers (not sure how prevalent it is anymore) that when a user opened a link in a new tab/window, that the document.referrer would not be set correctly.

[0wza]

Off topic a bit, but I just want to say I like the layout and the general approach of your blog. If it's a template I haven't seen it before.

The "pondering" section is intriguing. What if you could accept input as to what topics readers might prefer?

[vikrum]

Thanks! It's not from a template; it's super basic HTML I wrote up by hand with simple CSS behind it. Take a look at the source for http://5f5.org/ruminations/ — I copy and paste that into a new file and use that as a template for new posts.

The pondering section is where I keep notes to my self for future topics. There's a file in that directory that has a bunch of sentence fragments and ideas for other, not yet formed ideas.

I like the idea of suggesting new topics :)

[fraserharris]

Regarding mis-measuring "dark social": For ecommerce, Pinterest traffic is estimated to be 64% larger b/c of the popularity of the iPad app. This is significant given that Pinterest is now the 2nd largest referral source (depending on which ecommerce sites you are measuring).

http://llsocial.com/2012/07/pinterest-traffic-being-signific...

[vikrum]

With the Facebook and Twitter apps (and iOS apps, in general), they have complete control over how the network call is being made — and the referer makes it to the server (for the post part.) One would imagine Pinterest would want to maximize this number.

I'll try posting the referer detector to some more native apps and see what happens.