What Prompts Users to Click on News Headlines? A Clickstream Data Analysis of the Effects of News Recency and Popularity

• Published in: Information in Contemporary Society Vol. 11420; pp. 539 - 546
• Main Authors: Jiang, Tingting, Guo, Qian, Xu, Yaping, Zhao, Yang, Fu, Shiting
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2019; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Clickstream data; News headlines; Popularity; Recency
• ISBN: 3030157415; 9783030157418
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_51

A new headline nowadays has to compete for readers’ attention and sometimes it needs to entice readers to click and read the news article. The peripheral indicators of news headlines would provide visual suggestions for user to decide on which news to read and which to ignore. This study focused on the recency and popularity indicators of online news. For the purpose of revealing the relationships between news recency/popularity and users’ clicking behavior, a 2-month server log file containing 39,990,200 clickstream records from an institutional news site was analyzed in combination with the news recency and popularity information crawled from its homepage. It was found that more recent or more popular news headlines received more clicks. The results have important implications for news providers in creating effective news headlines and in publishing and disseminating news more responsibly. The introduction of unobtrusive clickstream data to user behavior analysis is a major methodological contribution.