Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from

Analyzing 1 Million Articles

Moz

This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of
over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to

understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links.

What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is sim-

ply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is
simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at
amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting
their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.

On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that people love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets far

more shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share
content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to work
much harder to acquire links. Our research uncovered:

The sweet spot content that achieves both shares and links

The content that achieves higher than average referring domain links

 The impact of content formats and content length on shares and links

Our summary findings are as follows:

1. The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In a
randomly selected sample of 100,000 posts over 50% had 2 or less

Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments) and over 75% had

zero external links. This suggests there is a lot of very poor content out
there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content.

2. When we looked at a bigger sample of 750,000 well shared posts we

found over 50% of these posts still had zero external links. Thus

suggests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cases large
numbers of shares, they find it far harder to acquire links.

3. Shares and links are not normally distributed around an average.

There are high performing outlier posts that get a lot of shares and

links but most content is grouped at the low end, with close to zero

shares and links. For example, over 75% of articles from our random
sample of 100,000 posts had zero external links and just 1 or less
referring domain link.

4. Across our total sample of 1m posts there was NO overall correlation

of shares and links, implying people share and link for different

reasons. The correlation of total shares and referring domain links

across 750,000 articles was just 0.021.

5. There are, however, specific content types that do have a strong

positive correlation of shares and links. This includes research backed

content and opinion forming journalism. We found these content
formats achieve both higher shares and significantly more links.

6. 85% of content published (excluding videos and quizzes) is less than

1,000 words long. However, long form content of over 1,000 words

consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content.
Either people ignore the data or it is simply too hard for them to write
quality long form content.

7. Content formats matter. Formats such as entertainment videos and

quizzes are far more likely to be shared than linked to. Some quizzes
and videos get hundreds of thousands of shares but no links.

8. List posts and videos achieve much higher shares on average than

other content formats. However, in terms of achieving links, list posts

and why posts achieve a higher number of referring domain links than

other content formats on average. While we may love to hate them, list
posts remain a powerful content format.

We have outlined the findings in more detail below. You can download the full
30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:

The majority of posts receive few shares and even

fewer links

We pulled an initial sample of 757,000 posts from the BuzzSumo database.

100,000 of these posts were pulled at random and acted as a control group. As

we wanted to investigate certain content formats, the other 657,000 were well
shared videos, how to posts, list posts, quizzes, infographics, why posts and

videos. The overall sample therefore had a specific bias to well shared posts and
specific content formats. However, despite this bias towards well shared arti-

cles, 50% of our 757,000 articles still had 11 or less Twitter shares and 50% of
the posts had zero external links.

By comparison 50% of the 100,000 randomly selected posts had 2 or less Twitter shares, 2 or less Facebook interactions, 1 or less Google+ shares and zero

LinkedIn shares. 75% of the posts had zero external links and 1 or less referring
domain links.

75% of randomly selected articles had zero external links

Shares and links are not normally distributed

Shares and links are not distributed normally around an average. Some posts go
viral and get a very high numbers of shares and links. This distorts the average,
the vast majority of posts receive very few shares or links and sit at the bottom
of a very skewed distribution curve as shown below.

This chart is cut off on the right at 1,000 shares, in fact the long thin tail would

extend a very long way as a number of articles received over 1m shares and one
received 5.7m shares.

This long tail distribution is the same for shares and links across all the domains
we analyzed. The skewed nature of the distribution means that averages can be
misleading due to the long tail of highly shared or linked content. In the exam-

ple below we show the distribution of shares for a domain. In this example the
average is the blue line but 50% of all posts lie to the left of the red line, the
median.

There is NO correlation of shares and links

We used the Pearson correlation co-efficient, a measure of the linear correlation
between two variables. The results can range from between 1 (a total positive

correlation) to 0 (where there is no correlation) to 1 (a total negative correlation).

The overall correlations for our sample were:

Total shares and Referring Domain Links 0.021
Total shares and Sub-domain Links 0.020
Total shares and External Links 0.011
The results suggest that people share and link to content for different reasons.
We also looked at different social networks to see if there were more positive
correlations for specific networks. We found no strong positive correlation of

shares to referring domain links across the different networks as shown below.
Facebook total interactions 0.0221
Twitter 0.0281

Linkedin 0.0216

Pinterest 0.0065

Google plus 0.0058

Whilst there is no correlation by social network there is some evidence that very
highly shared posts have a higher correlation of shares and links. This can be
seen below.

Content sample Average total shares Median shares Average referring domain

links Median referring domain links Correlation total shares - referring domains
Full sample
of posts

(757,317) 4,393 202 3.77 1 0.021 Posts with over

10,000 total shares

(69,114) 35,080 18,098 7.06 2 0.101

The increased correlation is relatively small, however, it does indicate that very
popular sites, other things being equal, would have slightly higher correlations
of shares and links.

Our finding that there is no overall correlation contradicts previous studies that

have suggested there is a positive correlation of shares and links. We believe the
previous findings may have been due to inadequate sampling as we will discuss
below.

The content sweet spot: content with a positive

correlation of shares and links

Our research found there are specific content types that have a high correlation
of shares and links. This content attracts both shares and links, and as shares

increase so do referring domain links. Thus whilst content is generally shared

and linked to for different reasons, there appears to be an overlap where some
content meets the criteria for both sharing and linking.

The content that falls into this overlap area, our sweet spot, includes content

from popular domains such as major publishers. In our sample the content also

included authoritative, research backed content, opinion forming journalism and

major news sites.

In our sample of 757,000 well shared posts the following were examples of
domains that had a high correlation of shares and links.

Site Number of articles in sample Referring domain links - total shares correlation The Breast Cancer Site 17 0.90 New York Review of books 11 0.95 Pew
Research 25 0.86 The Economist 129 0.73

We were very cautious about drawing conclusions from this data as the individual sample sizes were very small. We therefore undertook a second, separate

sampling exercise for domains with high correlations. This analysis is outlined
in the next section below.

Our belief is that previous studies may have sampled content disproportionately
from popular sites within the area of overlap. This would explain a positive

correlation of shares and links. However, the data shows that the domains in the
area of overlap are actually outliers when it comes to shares and links.

Sweet-spot content: opinion-forming journalism

and research-backed content

In order to explore further the nature of content on sites with high correlations
we looked at a further 250,000 random articles from those domains.

For example, we looked at 49,952 articles from the New York Times and 46,128
from the Guardian. These larger samples had a lower correlation of links and
shares, as we would expect due to the samples having a lower level of shares
overall. The figures were as follows:
Domain

Number articles in sample

Average Total Shares
Average Referring Domain Links
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
Nytimes.com
49,952
918
3.26
0.381
Theguardian.com
46,128
797
10.18
0.287
We then subsetted various content types to see if particular types of content had
higher correlations. During this analysis we found that opinion content from

these sites, such as editorials and columnists, had significantly higher average
shares and links, and a higher correlation. For example:
Opinion content
Number articles in sample
Average Total Shares
Average Referring Domain Links
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
Nytimes.com

4,143
3,990
9.2
0.498
Theguardian.com
19,606
1,777
12.54
0.433
The higher shares and links may be because opinion content tends to be focused
on current trending areas of interest and because the authors take a particular
slant or viewpoint that can be controversial and engaging.

We decided to look in more detail at opinion forming journalism. For example,

we looked at over 20,000 articles from The Atlantic and New Republic. In both

cases we saw a high correlation of shares and links combined with a high number of referring domain links as shown below.
Domain
Number articles in sample
Average Total Shares
Average Referring Domain Links
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
TheAtlantic.com
16,734
2,786

18.82
0.586
NewRepublic.com
6,244
997
12.8
0.529
This data appears to support the hypothesis that authoritative, opinion shaping

journalism sits within the content sweet spot. It particularly attracts more referring domain links.

The other content type that had a high correlation of shares and links in our original sample was research backed content. We therefore sampled more data

from sites that publish a lot of well researched and evidenced content. We found
content on these sites had a significantly higher number of referring domain

links. The content also had a higher correlation of links and shares as shown
below.

Domain
Number articles in sample
Average Total Shares
Average Referring Domain Links
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links
FiveThirtyEight.com
1,977
1,783
18.5

0.55
Priceonomics.com
541
1,797
11.49
0.629
PewResearch.com
892
751
25.7
0.4
Thus whilst overall there is no correlation of shares and links, there are specific

types of content that do have a high correlation of shares and links. This content
appears to sit close to the center of the overlap of shares and links, our content
sweet spot.

The higher correlation appears to be caused by the content achieving a higher

level of referring domain links. Shares are generally much easier to achieve than
referring domain links. You have to work much harder to get such links and it

appears that research backed content and authoritative opinion shaping journalism is better at achieving referring domain links.

Want shares and links? Create deep research or opinion-forming

content

Our conclusion is that if you want to create content that achieves a high level of
both shares and links then you should concentrate on opinion forming, authoritative content on current topics or well researched and evidenced content. This

post falls very clearly into the latter category, so we will shall see if this proves
to be the case here.

The impact of content format on shares and links

We specifically looked at the issue of content formats. Previous research had

suggested that some content formats may have a higher correlation of shares

and links. Below are the details of shares and links by content format from our
sample of 757,317 posts.
Content Type
Number in sample
Average Total Shares
Average Referring Domain Links
Correlation of total shares & referring domain links
List post
99,935
10,734
6.19
0.092
Quiz
69,757
1,374
1.6
0.048
Why post
99,876
1,443

5.66
0.125
How to post
99,937
1,782
4.41
0.025
Infographic
98,912
268
3.67
0.017
Video
99,520
8,572
4.13
0.091
What stands out is the high level of shares for list posts and videos.
By contrast the average level of shares for infographics is very low. Whilst the

top infographics did well (there were 343 infographics with more than 10,000

shares) the majority of infographics in our sample performed poorly. Over 50%

of infographics (53,000 in our sample) had zero external links and 25% had less
than 10 shares in total across all networks. This may reflect a recent trend to
turn everything into an infographic leading to many poor pieces of content.

What also stands out is the relatively low number of referring domain links for

quizzes. People may love to share quizzes but they are less likely to link to them.
In terms of the correlation of total shares and referring domain links, Why posts
had the highest correlation than all other content types at 0.125. List posts and

videos also have a higher correlation than the overall sample correlation which
was 0.021.

List posts appear to perform consistently well as a content format in terms of

both shares and links.

Some content types are more likely to be shared than linked to

Surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the

potential to go viral with high shares. However, this form of content is far less
likely to achieve links.

Entertaining content such as Vine videos and quizzes often had zero links despite very high levels of shares. Here are some examples.
Content
Total Shares
External Links
Referring Domain Links

Long form content consistently receives more shares and links

than shorter-form content

We removed videos and quizzes from our initial sample to analyze the impact of

content length. This gave us a sample of 489,128 text based articles which broke
down by content length as follows:

Length (words) No in sample Percent <1,000 418,167 85.5 1-2,000 58,642 12

2-3,000 8,172 1.7 3,000-10,000 3,909 0.8

Over 85% of articles had less than 1,000 words.

We looked at the impact of content length on total shares and domain links.
Length (words) Total Shares Average Referring Domain Links Average <1,000
2,823 3.47 1-2,000 3,456 6.92 2-3,000 4,254 8.81 3-10,000 5,883 11.07

We can see that long form content consistently gets higher average shares and

significantly higher average links. This supports our previous research findings,
although there are exceptions, particularly with regard to shares. One such

exception we identified is IFL Science, that publishes short form content shared
by its 21m Facebook fans. The site curates images and videos to explain scienti-

fic research and findings. This article examines how they create their short form

viral content. However, IFLS Science is very much an exception. On average long
form content performs better, particularly when it comes to links.

When we looked at the impact of content length on the correlation of shares and
links. we found that content of over 1,000 words had a higher correlation but
the correlation did not increase further beyond 2,000 words.

Length (words) Correlation Shares/Links <1,000 0.024 1-2,000 0.113 2-3,000

0.094 3,000+ 0.072

The impact of combined factors

We have not undertaken any detailed linear regression modelling or built any

predictive models but it does appear that a combination of factors can increase

shares, links and the correlation. For example, when we subsetted List posts to
look at those over 1,000 words in length, the average number of referring

domain links increased from 6.19 to 9.53. Similarly in our original sample there
were 1,332 articles from the New York Times. The average number of referring

domain links for the sample was 7.2. When we subsetted out just the posts over
1,000 words the average number of referring domain links increased to 15.82.
When we subsetted out just the List posts the average number of referring
domain links increased further to 18.5.

The combined impact of factors such as overall site popularity, content format,
content type and content length is an area for further investigation. However,

the initial findings do indicate that shares and/or links can be increased when
some of these factors are combined.

You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:
Steve will be discussing the findings at a Mozinar on September 22, at 10.30am
Pacific Time. You can register and save your place here https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/41189941...

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