Handling of online information by users: evidence from TED talks

Abstract

This paper studies how people search for, choose, process and evaluate information provided online. In this context, the study analyses how the content and context of online information are related to the length of information and to user ratings. Employing naturalistic data that cover the titles, durations and viewer-assigned ratings/tags of more than two-thousand TED talks, the paper investigates whether (i) the talk duration is related to viewer-assigned ratings, (ii) there is a link between the talk duration and attention driving factors (title words), and (iii) the ex-ante wording of talks' titles and ex-post user-assigned ratings are connected. The findings show that talks with certain end-user ratings have significantly different length, most strikingly, talks first rated as persuasive are on average 35% longer than talks first rated as ingenious. Also the inclusion of certain words in the talk title significantly affects both the talk duration and enduser ratings. For instance, talks whose title include 'child' are on average 27% longer than other talks; or talks whose title include 'brain' are 57% more likely to be rated as fascinating than others. Overall, the paper reveals regularities regarding information processing attitudes, attention and subjective evaluations of online information users.

Drivers of Popularity of Online Information: Content, Context and Psychological Processes

“…As the first novelty of the paper, we incorporate the total (the log of total number of views: LVIEW) and per-unit-time (here, the log of views per month: LVPM) counts of viewing for each talk in our dataset in addition to those listed above. Compared to Özmen and Yücel (2019), where talk durations and ratings were linked to their determinants via Least Squares regressions, these counts considerably enrich our grasp of the data as they constitute our dependent variables (that quantify popularity) subsequently.…”

“…In this paper, we aim to communicate our findings associated Business and Economics Research Journal, 14(4): [445][446][447][448][449][450][451][452][453][454][455][456][457][458][459][460][461][462][463][464]2023 Drivers of Popularity of Online Information: Content, Context and Psychological Processes with these questions in the context of the popularity of online information and in an environment where digital technologies have transformed user behaviour, considering the psychological processes that may be at play. Özmen and Yücel (2019) state that a structural change in the accessibility and abundance of information has challenged the classical methods of knowing things at the nexus of content and context of information. This is based on the supposition that "the making of the intellectuality itself relied on finding an ambitiously fine line to separate quality from quantity, challenging from digestible, scientific from bogus and creative from straightforward".…”

“…While Özmen and Yücel (2019) quantify (1) the relations between viewer-assigned ratings, talk durations, and wording of talk titles and (2) the relations between previously assigned audience ratings and the subsequent online viewing behaviour, this study goes beyond that by unveiling the impacts of actual content, including the psychological processes, as well as the popularity of the talk. So, this paper tells more on the questioned balance between context and content in determining the "importance" of an information stream.…”

“…Thus, this study's novelties are the coverage of the directly content-related measures and denoting popularity as the primary variable of interest. From the theoretical background, the paper builds on the information retrieval and processing theories and economics of attention as thoroughly discussed in Özmen (2015) and Özmen and Yücel (2019); and uses the online information provided in various formats -videos, and text-as the metrics for the empirical analysis.…”

“…In direct relationship to this paper, earlier research efforts on online viewing behavior and TED Talks are not poor, as summarized in Table 1. Topics covered Gao and Bai (2014) Importance of the information provision style and consumers' perception Khan and Vong (2014) Effect of contextual features of the videos and the indicators related to the outreach of the users uploading on YouTube on the virality of videos Özmen (2015) Attractiveness of photos, tags, the dominance of visual content over the textual, and the attention-augmenting role of photos Budzinski and Gaenssle (2018) Content uploading behavior of social media superstars Tafesse (2020) Investigation of the link between the contextual features of trending YouTube videos with the number of viewings Liao et al (2021) Recommendation systems, analysis through clustering analysis Skarpa and Garoufallou (2021) Public's information-seeking behavior on COVID-19 via surveys Azzopardi (2021) Cognitive biases in the field of information retrieval Acoustic and speech recognition aspects Cettolo et al (2012) Formation of a Web inventory of transcribed and translated talks Rubenstein (2012) Innovative future possibilities for TED Talks concerning mainly education Pappas and Popescu-Belis (2013) Utility for a one-class collaborative filtering task such as bookmarking Sugimoto et al (2013) Linkages between academic citations and TED appearances Di Carlo (2014) Assessment of TED Talks via Hyland (2010)'s concept of proximity Romanelli et al (2014) Benefits and and downsides of TED Talks for dissemination of ideas Rousseau et al (2014) Use of TED data in language modelling Tsou et al (2014) Impacts of presenter characteristics and platform on the reception of videos Bertero and Fung (2017) Algorithms to detect emotions in TED Talks Chen and Lee ( 2017Prediction of the audience's laughing behavior at TED Talks Tanveer et al (2018) Relation between narrative trajectories and the ratings of TED Talks Özmen and Yücel (2019) Relationships between the talk duration and viewer ratings, attention driving factors; between the ex-ante wording of talk titles and ex-post viewer ratings Kinnaird and Laudun (2019) Discussion of how the talk transcripts are useful in examining accuracy and quality Schwemmer and Jungkunz (2019) Analysis of TED talk transcripts to investigate whether female speakers, speakers from different ethnic groups, and some topics are less represented on the stag...…”