What a link in your post costs you
A post that sends the reader off X gets 22% fewer views than the same kind of post without a link. Put the link in your first reply instead.
for a post that carries a link out, against the same kind of post without one
01The answer, before the working
Everything here compares like with like: a post with no photo and no video against another post with no photo and no video. And it compares a founder's posts with their own, never with somebody who has a different-sized following. We count views, because views are the thing you actually get.
Put the link in a reply to your own post, not in the post. A post carrying a link out gets 22% fewer views than the same kind of post without one. Compare each founder only with themselves and the figure is 34% fewer, with 24 of 27 founders who do both coming off worse. A reply carries no such cost, because it was never going to be put in front of the same number of people.
Compare a founder's own posts with each other and a post that would normally be seen by a thousand people is seen by about 660 with a link in it. That is the 34% figure. The 22% figure compares all the founders together instead.
02First, a rule we published and are withdrawing
We published that the single worst thing you can post is a bare link. On this data it is not just unproven: the numbers go the other way. Posts we have saved as nothing but a short link pull 6,995 views against 3,259 for the same founders' other posts. That is 115% more, not less.
The reason is not that bare links work. It is that these are not bare links. They are posts whose text and media our collector failed to record, 204 of them in six weeks, disproportionately from large accounts. The biggest is a 23 characters of text, from a 986,000-follower account, with 11.7 million views. Nobody gets 11.7 million views from a naked link; that is a post whose contents we lost.
When a published number turns out to be our own mistake, we say so loudly. Nobody outside can catch that kind for us.
03The trap that hides the real number
Ask the obvious question (do posts with a link do worse?) and the answer comes back as no measurable difference. That answer is wrong.
X adds its own short link to any post that has a photo or a video in it. So every photo post and 99.8% of video posts count as carrying a link, even though nobody is being sent anywhere. Counting those as "has a link" really means "has a photo or a video", and a video is one of the best things you can put in a post. The two pull in opposite directions, so the answer comes back as nothing.
The fix is to compare like with like: posts with no photo and no video that carry a link, against posts with no photo and no video that do not. Same kind of post, same authors, one difference. Every number on this page is that comparison.
X adds its own short link to any post with a photo or video attached, so the plain "has a link" flag is really a "has something attached" flag.
6 July to 16 August 2026 · founders board
Swipe the chart sideways to see all of it →
04What a link actually costs you
Neither bar has a photo or a video in it, so the only difference is the link.
A link costs 22% of your views and 52% of your reactions, on 441 posts with a link against 5,374 without.
Posts with nothing attached on both sides, so the format is not doing the work.
441 linked and 5,374 plain posts · 6 July to 16 August 2026
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| Posts with nothing attached | Typical views | Typical reactions | Posts |
|---|---|---|---|
| No link in the post | 2,444 | 31 | 5,374 |
| A link in the post | 1,916 | 15 | 441 |
| What the link costs you | 22% of your views | 52% of your reactions | — |
Same kind of post either way, so the only difference is the link.
05And it is not a handful of founders dragging the average
The figures above pool everybody together. The stronger test is to compare each founder only with themselves: their own posts with a link against their own posts without. The answer depends on how many posts with a link, and how many without, we require before we count a founder at all, so here are three answers rather than the one that flatters us most.
The more posts we require, the bigger the cost looks and the more one-sided the head count gets. The honest reading: a link costs somewhere between 18% and 41% of your views, and it costs almost everybody something.
Three bars, three answers to "how many posts before somebody counts". None of them is flattering.
2+ linked: 18% on 51 founders · 3+ linked: 34% on 27 founders · 4+ linked: 41% on 24 founders
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| Founders who count | How many | Views lost to the link | How many came off worse |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2+ linked and 3+ plain posts | 51 | 18% fewer | 39 of 51 (76.5%) |
| 3+ linked and 5+ plain posts | 27 | 34% fewer | 24 of 27 (88.9%) |
| 4+ linked and 6+ plain posts | 24 | 41% fewer | 23 of 24 (95.8%) |
The middle row is the one quoted at the top of this page.
06Does it depend on how big you are? We cannot say.
An earlier version of this finding said the cost grows the bigger your account gets, and gave three neat numbers to prove it. Measured in views those numbers do not line up that way, so that claim is withdrawn.
Small, medium and large accounts all lose views to a link. But which size loses most keeps changing, depending on how many posts with a link we require before we count a founder at all: require two and the largest accounts look worst, require three and the mid-sized ones do, require four and it changes again. Each size group ends up resting on between 4 and about twenty founders, which is nowhere near enough to rank them.
A link costs you views at every size we can measure. Whether it costs a large account more than a small one, we do not know. If you are very small the numbers are small either way, so the clicks may well be worth more to you than the views. That is a judgement, not a finding.
The cost appears at all three sizes. Which size loses most does not hold up from one way of counting to the next, which is why no size rule is published here.
under 5,000 followers 25% fewer · 5,000 to 50,000 8% fewer · over 50,000 50% fewer
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| Account size | Typical views, no link | With a link | Views lost | Posts compared |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under 5,000 followers | 208 | 155 | 25% fewer | 92 with, 969 without |
| 5,000 to 50,000 | 1,695 | 1,563 | 8% fewer | 199 with, 2,463 without |
| over 50,000 | 11,142 | 5,537 | 50% fewer | 150 with, 1,942 without |
The cost is there at all three sizes. The ordering is not.
07The same result on a completely different set of posts
The strongest test of a finding is to try it on a completely different set of posts. On January and February 2025 (eighteen months earlier), posts with nothing attached and a link got 3,503 views against 5,084 without. That is 31% fewer, on 746 link posts from 141 founders.
One caveat on the older figure. For those posts we have no straight record of what was attached, so we worked it out from whether a picture or a video was saved alongside the post. On the 2026 posts, working it out that way picks the same posts and gives the same answer as the straight record, which is why we are willing to quote the older figure.
| Set of posts | Typical views with a link | Without | Views lost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 July to 16 August 2026 | 1,916 | 2,444 | 22% fewer |
| January and February 2025 | 3,503 | 5,084 | 31% fewer |
Two separate sets of posts, eighteen months apart, same answer.
08What to do with this
Put the link in the first reply, not in the post. The post costs you 22% of its views for carrying it; a reply costs nothing, and the reader gets there in one extra tap.
Adding a photo does not win the views back. Every comparison here is between posts that have no photo and no video, so what you are seeing is the cost of the link itself.
Do not read a size rule into it. It costs you views whether you are small or large. Anyone giving you an exact multiplier for your follower count, including the earlier version of this page, is over-reading the data.
Ignore any bare-link rule, including ours. We cannot measure it here, because when a post looks like nothing but a link it is almost always a post whose text and pictures we lost.
How this was measured
Every original post from the founders board on X between 6 July to 16 August 2026 with no photo and no video: 5,815 posts from 99 founders. Replies and quotes are excluded (X shows them to a different set of people), and so is anything carrying a photo or a video, for the reason in the section above.
A post "carries a link out" when its text contains a link that is not the one X adds for attached media. Posts with a photo or a video attached are excluded from both sides, so the comparison is between posts of the same kind.
The first figure puts every founder's posts in one pile and compares the typical post on each side. The second compares each founder's own posts with a link against their own posts without one, then takes the typical founder, so one person with a huge following cannot move it.
What this cannot tell you
We cannot see where the link went. A link to your own site and a link to somebody else's article are the same thing here, and they are plainly not the same decision.
We measure views on X. A link that costs you readers and earns you signups is a trade this data cannot price for you.
Restricting the comparison to posts with nothing attached is what makes it honest and also what makes it small: 441 link posts across 99 founders.
The founder-by-founder figures rest on between 24 and 51 people depending on where the bar is set. That is the price of holding everything else constant, and it is why this page gives a range rather than one confident number.
Questions
Ask about anything on this page. Questions and answers are public. Every answer comes from the numbers on this page, and if those numbers cannot answer your question, you will be told so.
More from this board
Every number on this page comes from tracKeting, founders board, 99 founders on X, 6 July to 16 August 2026. Anything you ask about this page is answered from the numbers on it, and where they cannot answer, you will be told.
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