The stories people share aren't necessarily the stories their friends want to read, according to data from 33Across, which tracks links for online publications.
It found that people are sharing science related content more often than any other content category. However, science content is clicked on significantly less than the content that is less popular for sharing, like politics, news, or celebrity gossip.
There's some rationale behind the split in what's read and what's shared. People will want to share science content because it makes them seem smart. People will click on celebrity content because no one will know.
The data in this chart shows how many stories are shared in a particular category for every 100 reads. So, for every 100 reads of a science story, 17 are shared. The clicked is how many links are clicked by the person sent the link.
33Across further explains how it got the data by saying, "33Across examined 500 of its largest publishers across 24 content categories. Sharing rate is calculated by dividing the number of shares by the number of pageviews for a given site. This normalizes the data to provide an apples-to-apples comparison across categories. Clickback rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on all shared links for a web site by the number of total shares for the web site. For example, if site xyz.com has 1,000 total shares and 500 clicks on the shared links, then the clickback rate would be 50%."