I wrote this message, with a link, and a picture:

Almost every major patent concept from the 1930s was in chemistry. Today, all software. http://t.co/I5TamvQHdQ pic.twitter.com/QHNDFAyNRl — Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) February 9, 2015

By Friday morning, it had about 155,260 impressions. According to the new Tweet activity dashboard, 2.9 percent of those users clicked the image, and 1.1 percent retweeted or favored it ...

... but just 1 percent clicked on the link to actually read my story. One percent.

Even worse, of the 9,017 people who clicked somewhere, anywhere on my message, just one in six of those clicks actually went to The Atlantic website. Quantitatively speaking, my viral tweet had the click-through rate of a digital display ad in East Asia.

Every good media organization knows that the road to traffic leads through Facebook rather than Twitter. Even so, I thought the sharing economy of the Internet shared a bit more than this.

A tweet with 10,000 interactions is an exception, and I was interested in the rule. So I went to Twitter's user analytics page to download the data on my 100 most popular tweets of the last year. If I could prove to my bosses (and to myself) that Twitter could, even occasionally, deliver meaningful audiences, it might validate my infatuation. Alas, my most popular tweets averaged a click-through rate of about 1.7 percent, still quite near the rate of conversions on flash-media East Asian display ads. Without revealing numbers that will get me in trouble with my bosses, I concluded that my prodigious use of Twitter in the last 30 days has cumulatively driven less traffic to TheAtlantic.com than one of my below-average stories.

Is the social web just a matrix of empty shares, of hollow generosity? As Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile once said (on Twitter), there is "effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading." People read without sharing, but just as often, perhaps, they share without reading.

When I graphed my 100 most popular tweets by clicks (graph one below) and engagement (graph two), the result is a jagged mess. Many of my most engaged tweets barely generated any clicks. Readers treated the URL in the tweet as a footnote. Some tweets, you might say, are "too good to click": They offer such a complete story that it leaves no curious itch.

Twitter as Television: Watch But Don't Click

There used to be a vague sense that Twitter drives traffic, and traffic drives renown (or fame, or pride, or whatever word defines the psychic benefit of public recognition). Instead, the truth is that Twitter can drive one sort of renown (there are some people who are Twitter-famous), and traffic affords a different psychic currency. But they are nearly independent variables.

I wanted another perspective. So I wrote an email to my Atlantic colleague Robinson Meyer, who has established himself as one of the smarter commentators on the peculiarities of digital media. I told him I had created something that 150,000 people had seen, 9,000 people had interacted with, and just 1,500 had followed to our site to actually read. (So, 99 percent of my labor on Twitter went to Twitter, and 1 percent went to The Atlantic. That's not a very good deal for our boss!) It was, I told Rob, as if Twitter had built a feature illustrating how much people were ignoring its power users.