4.2 Article

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

Journal

ASLIB JOURNAL OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Volume 72, Issue 1, Pages 49-66

Publisher

EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1108/AJIM-04-2019-0097

Keywords

Clicking behaviour; Clickstream data analysis; Crawled data; News headline presentation; News selection; Unobtrusive methods

Funding

  1. National Natural Science Foundation of China [71774125, 71420107026]

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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.

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