Story-focused Reading in Online News and its Potential for User Engagement

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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.


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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)



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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.


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?


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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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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0.3

0.6

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10−4 10−3 10−2 10−1

Prob. of story-focused reading

Den

sity

Actual data

Shuffled data

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0

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0.25 0.50 0.75Prob. of multi-provider reading

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sity

Actual data

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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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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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

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-20

0

20

40

60

80

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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

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[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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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

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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

Story-focused Reading in Online News and its Potential for User Engagement

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