What prompts users to click on news headlines? Evidence from unobtrusive data analysis

Abstract

Purpose The headlines of online news are created carefully to influence audience news selection today. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between news headline presentation and users’ clicking behavior. Design/methodology/approach Two types of unobtrusive data were collected and analyzed jointly for this purpose. A two-month server log file containing 39,990,200 clickstream records was obtained from an institutional news site. A clickstream data analysis was conducted at the footprint and movement levels, which extracted 98,016 clicks received by 7,120 headlines ever displayed on the homepage. Meanwhile, the presentation of these headlines was characterized from seven dimensions, i.e. position, format, text length, use of numbers, use of punctuation marks, recency and popularity, based on the layout and content crawled from the homepage. Findings This study identified a series of presentation characteristics that prompted users to click on the headlines, including placing them in the central T-shaped zones, using images, increasing text length properly for greater clarity, using visually distinctive punctuation marks, and providing recency and popularity indicators. Originality/value The findings have valuable implications for news providers in attracting clicks to their headlines. Also, the successful application of nonreactive methods has significant implications for future user studies in both information science and journalism.

Data analytics of social media publicity to enhance household waste management

“…Views, likes, comments and replies were suggested to indicate the popularity of social media by Jiang et al. (2019) .…”

“…There is a paucity of literature on measuring social media publicity systematically in household waste management. Generally, the popularity of a subscription account on social media could be reflected by user engagement ( Aldous et al., 2019 ), such as views ( Jiang et al., 2019 ), likes ( Ksiazek et al., 2016 ), user-to-user interaction ( Hu et al., 2017 ) and user comments ( Gaenssle and Budzinski, 2020 ). Previous observations indicated that the popularity of a social media post regarding household waste management was related to its publishing time ( Ma and Chen, 2017 ), published title and topics ( Jing and Wei, 2016 ) in attracting the user attention.…”

Topic Modeling of the Pakistani Economy in English Newspapers via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

“…The extracted data were based on the titles of the newspaper articles. The rationale for selecting these titles of the newspapers is to present the crux of the content written in the article (Jiang et al, 2019). These headlines though provided limited data yet encompassed the complete picture of the selected articles.…”

Measuring user interactions with websites: A comparison of two industry standard analytics approaches using data of 86 websites

“…For example, there can be an e-commerce site where a potential consumer arrives on a product page, reads the content, and takes no other action at that time. Another case is a newspaper site where an audience member comes to the site, scans the headlines, reads the article snippets, but takes no other action, such as clicking [126]. In each of these cases, the visit could last several minutes or longer.…”