We analyze the importance of two types of engagement signals in the domain of digital publishing:

1. content popularity, measured by page-views & click-through rates within the Outbrain network, and
2. content share-ability, measured by the proportion of Facebook shares.

- First, we show that counter-intuitively, the correlation between these signals is very low.
- Second, we characterize content which is very popular, but not shared, as "socially unacceptable" and show various examples.
- Third, we compare the predictive value and relative importance of each of these signals in production, as part of our recommendation system's modeling.

The results of the research are based on more than 100,000 articles, spanning across 200 publishers worldwide, which accounted for more than 1.8 Billion visits during two different time periods (Feb. 2015 and Nov. 2015). The implications of this study are important for data scientists, publishers and content marketers.

(Joint work with Ram Meshulam, Outbrain)

Private-Social dissonance: Things people like to read vs are ready to share publicly.