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Story-focused Reading in Online News and its Potential for User Engagement
Janette Lehmann, Carlos Castillo, Mounia Lalmas, Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Story-focused news reading
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• While reading news, users may become interested in a particular news item, and want to find more about it:
– to obtain various angles on the story
– to overcome media bias – to confirm the veracity of what they are reading
– …
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Story-focused news reading
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• Previous studies found that – many users visit established news outlets to confirm a story, no matter
from which source the information initially came from (The Poynter Institute)
– some users find links to related information on a news article page important (Pew Research Center)
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Story-focused news reading
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• News sites recognise that users want to further inform themselves so they: – provide information on different aspects or components of a story
– link to other articles published by them and other sites
Our goal is to understand the effect of story-focused news reading on user engagement and provide insights into how news sites can support it.
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Questions
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• Does story-focused news reading exist and to what extent? • What are the characteristics of story-focused news reading? • How do links on news articles promote story-focused news reading? • How does story-focused news reading impact user engagement?
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
One-month Yahoo Toolbar data
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• A news story is a collection of articles related to same news event (TD-IDF term weight in article and cosine similarity with threshold 0.4)
• On average, each story has 14 articles (median 8), is covered by 7 news sites (median 5), and has 2,482 users per story (median 758)
65 popular news sites publishing articles in English; 4.9M news reading sessions; covering 2,536 stories comprising 25,703 news articles
• Percentage of users engaging at least once in story-focused reading is 16% • Avid news readers more likely to engage in story-focused reading:
– 64% of users with at least 15 reading sessions have at least one story-focused session
– But being an active news reader does not imply engaging in story-focused reading
Questions
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• Does story-focused news reading exist and to what extent? • What are the characteristics of story-focused news reading? • How do links on news articles promote story-focused news reading? • How does story-focused news reading impact user engagement?
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Story-focus news reading exist • shuffle test: alternative dataset with same
distribution of session length, but with random articles
• probability of story-focused reading is x4 larger and probability of multi-site is x2 larger in actual dataset than shuffle dataset
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Prob. of story-focused reading
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sity
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Shuffled data
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0.25 0.50 0.75Prob. of multi-provider reading
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sity
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Shuffled data
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story-focused reading does not depend on popularity of a story, its number of articles, or number of news sites that cover it
Questions
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• Does story-focused news reading exist and to what extent? • What are the characteristics of story-focused news reading? • How do links on news articles promote story-focused news reading? • How does story-focused news reading impact user engagement?
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Story-focused vs non story-focused reading
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% sessions
num. of articles
% focused
duration (minutes) number of sites
non-foc. foc. non-foc. foc.
74.93 17.31 4.95 1.66 0.63 0.27 0.12 0.13
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7>
15.16 29.00 41.33 51.02 60.85 67.13 78.15
3.09 5.77 8.57
11.24 13.60 15.92 18.61 21.29
6.66 9.23
12.92 15.96 18.35 21.59 27.91
1.00 1.20 1.37 1.52 1.65 1.81 1.91 2.12
1.26 1.48 1.67 1.83 1.98 2.14 2.55
• users spend more time reading news when focusing on a specific story • more sites are accessed when users engage in story-focused reading
when session length increases (more articles are read) à probability that session is story-focused increases
Depth of story-focused reading
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session %
number of articles duration (minutes) number of sites
in-story out-story total per-article
85.03 11.48 2.43 0.69 0.23 0.08 0.06
2 3 4 5 6 7
>7
0.89 1.09 1.45 1.67 1.80 2.67 3.05
6.67 10.48 14.29 18.23 20.09 23.09 25.03
3.34 3.49 3.57 3.65 3.35 3.30 2.79
1.27 1.53 1.79 2.05 2.31 2.36 3.19
Per-article dwell time increases for sessions with <= 5 articles: users spend time reading articles they are accessing
Per-article dwell time decreases for sessions > 5 articles: users are skimming articles, as articles contain increasingly more redundant information
number out-story articles increases as session depth increases
deeper story-focused sessions are longer à involve a larger number of sites + and mostly made of in-story articles
Questions
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• Does story-focused news reading exist and to what extent? • What are the characteristics of story-focused news reading? • How do links on news articles promote story-focused news reading? • How does story-focused news reading impact user engagement?
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
Links • Type of link, Position of link, Number of link • Performance metrics:
• Popularity: percentage of links of a particular group • Performance: how often the links in the group are clicked (percentage)
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2 3 4 5 6 7 >7 0
20
40
60
80
100
Number of in-story news articles
% o
f ups
trea
m tr
affic
Internal Article (Int) Non-Article (Int) External
• 75.45% of articles have inline links
• 6.4% of links in article are inline links
inline links
Link performance: Type of links • Internal links within articles promotes story-focused reading • Users tend to click on links that bring them to other news articles within same site
14
-20
0
20
40
60
80
100
Internal Article (Int) Non-Article (Int) External
% Articles with this type of links Popularity (%) of this type of links
Performance (%) of this type of links
apart for multimedia, no external links with
performance comparable to internal links to news
articles
Link performance: Position of links
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−0.2
0.0
0.2
[0,0.1[ [0.3,0.4[ [0.6,0.7[ [0.9,1]Position in article text
Lin
k p
erforman
ceLin
k p
opula
rity
Link popularity● Link performance
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10%
20%
30%best performance with links at end of articles good performance for links in upper 20% and 40% of article (multimedia) low performance for links at top articles
Link performance: Number of links • < 10 inline links may be wasting an
opportunity, as users may be enticed to click to access related content
• > 10 and < 29 links does not result in more clicks, but spreads the clicks more
• > 29 links may actually harm user experience
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0
5
10
15
20
[0,2] [9,11] [18,20] [27,29] [36,38]
Num
ber
of cl
icks
Number of inline links in article
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
[0,2] [9,11] [18,20] [27,29] [36,38]
Number of inline links in article
Avg.
click
s per
lin
k
is 10 links per-article the “sweet spot”?
Questions
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• Does story-focused news reading exist and to what extent? • What are the characteristics of story-focused news reading? • How do links on news articles promote story-focused news reading? • How does story-focused news reading impact user engagement?
Users read multiple articles about a particular news development or event.
User engagement
• 50 news sites, 57K users,1M sessions with users with at least one non-story-focused reading session and one story-focused reading session
• Engagement metrics:
– Dwell time: time spend on news site – Absence time: % of sessions with absence time < 12 hours on news site
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• story-focused reading vs non story-focused reading • internal story-focused reading vs external story-focused reading
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User engagement: Dwell Time
internal story-focused sessions: • dwell time higher compared to
non story-focused sessions • average increase in dwell
time is 50% external story-focused sessions: • no observable effect on dwell
time News provider
Dw
ell tim
e per
ses
sion
Non-focused Focused Ext-focused
User engagement: Absence Time
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internal story-focused sessions: • for 78% of sites, probability that
users return within 12 hours increases by 68%
external story-focused sessions: • for 70% of sites, probability that
users return within 12 hours increases by 76% News provider
p(a
bse
nce
12
h)
Non-focused Focused Ext-focused
Story-focused news reading exist …………and
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• Internal inks within article promotes story-focused reading and keeps users engaged – longer period of engagement (reading sessions are longer) and earlier re-
engagement (shorter absence time).
• External links does not have negative effect on user engagement – period of engagement remains the same (reading sessions are the same),
and re-engagement begins even sooner (shorter absence time).
• Important to use links properly, in terms of quantity, type and position.
Future work
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• We need to account for the novelty and more importantly the quality of the related content
• The online news ecosystem has changed, both in terms of how news sites provides news and how users inform themselves