What prompts users to click on news headlines? Evidence from unobtrusive data analysis
| Date | 28 October 2019 |
| Pages | 49-66 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-04-2019-0097 |
| Published date | 28 October 2019 |
| Author | Tingting Jiang,Qian Guo,Shunchang Chen,Jiaqi Yang |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
What prompts users to click on
news headlines? Evidence from
unobtrusive data analysis
Tingting Jiang
School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China and
Center for Studies of Information Resources,
Wuhan University, Wuhan, China, and
Qian Guo, Shunchang Chen and Jiaqi Yang
School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
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 mo vement 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.
Keywords Clicking behaviour, Clickstream data analysis, Crawled data, News headline presentation,
News selection, Unobtrusive methods
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The shift of news consumption to online sources has been taking place globally. According
to the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of American adults read news online at least
occasionally, either via mobile or desktop devices (Katerina and Elisa, 2018). Readers turn
most frequently to social media and news organizations’websites and applications for news
(www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/digital-news/). In China, the size of online news consumers
has reached 663m, and 95 percent of them are mobile users (www.cnnic.net.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwx
zbg/hlwtjbg/201808/P0201808206308892 99840.pdf ). An important fact found by the
Chinese Online News Market Survey 2016 is that many people tended to read merely the
news headlines or the news in the first screen and barely involved themselves in in-depth
reading. This could be primarily attributed to the news explosion on the internet
(www.cnnic.cn/hlwfzyj/hlwxzbg/mtbg/201701/P020170112309068736023.pdf ).
Nowadays, news organizations worldwide produce online news continuously, which is
complemented by social media that have greatly accelerated news dissemination and
consumption.Most online news consumers feeloverloaded with the amount ofnews available Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 72 No. 1, 2020
pp. 49-66
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-04-2019-0097
Received 17 April 2019
Revised 27 July 2019
Accepted 16 September 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
This research has been made possible through the financial support of the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grants Nos 71774125 and 71420107026.
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Evidence from
unobtrusive
data analysis
(Holton and Chyi,2012). News selection is a forced move for them to takein order to cope with
information overload (Edgerly et al., 2014). Unlike print newspapers, the display of online
news features an entering page that lists headlines hyperlinked to news article pages. The
presentation of headlines on the entering page has a substantial impact on what will be read
and what will be ignored (Knobloch-Westerwick, Sharma, Hansen and Alter, 2005).
As a result, the major role of an online news headline is no longer a succinct and accurate
summary of the corresponding news story. Instead, it should at least be able to arouse users’
curiosity about the news story, and sometimes it needs to entice them to click and open the
news articles (Arapakis et al., 2014). If a headline loses the competition for users’clicks,
the news article will stay ignored despite its high quality (Kuiken et al., 2017). News
providers are thus striving to increase headline salience in virtue of visual cues, including
both headline components (e.g. use of numbers and/or questions) and peripheral indicators
(e.g. recency and/or popularity indicators) (Xu, 2013).
A number of studies have been conducted on the influence of various headline
characteristics on news consumers’attention, perception and behavior, which will be
reviewed in detail in the next section. Existing findings derived mainly from experiments,
lab-based or field, that intimated real-world news consumption scenarios. Instead, this study
made creative use of the clickstream data generated from users interacting with online news
in the real world, coupled with the page layout and content crawled from a working
news site. The goal is to reveal the relationships between headline presentation and
users’news selection behavior. The following research questions are addressed:
RQ1. What are the characteristics of online news headline presentation in terms of
position, format, text length, use of numbers, use of punctuation marks, currency
and popularity, respectively?
RQ2. Do the differencesin each characteristic dimensionengender different newsselection
behavior? If yes, what are the differences?
Literature review
News selection
News selection in early studies actually referred to how journalists selected news to report
(Welbers et al., 2016). In contrast, how the audience selected news to read remained
under-researched until the explosion of online news. Audience news selection can be made
based on content or form (Knobloch-Westerwick, Sharma, Hansen and Alter, 2005). Content-
based news selection is driven by user motivations and goals (Edgerly et al., 2014). The
personal utilityof news content basically determines news selectivity (Knobloch-Westerwick,
Dillman Carpentier, Blumhoffand Nickel, 2005). Due to information overload,however, highly
routinized news consumption has been replaced gradually by stumbling upon news online.
News acquisitionis increasingly associated with users’low involvement and low expectation
(Yadamsuren and Erdelez, 2016). This has given rise to form-based news selection that
emphasizes news display features, such as headline typeface size and accompanying
illustrations.Also, collaborative filteringrecommendations, includingimplicit (e.g. times read)
and explicit (e.g. ratings) indicators, have been introduced to affect news selection
(Knobloch-Westerwick, Sharma, Hansen and Alter, 2005).
Selection is a process consisting of three levels: selective attention determines to which
stimuli in the environment our perceptual system is addressed; selective perception
determines how information adapted to our cognitive system will be processed and stored;
and selective retention determines which of the prior stored information our cognitive
system will recollect (Donsbach, 2004). Form-based news selection has been investigated at
the first two levels. Bucher and Schumacher (2006) compared the attention patterns in the
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AJIM
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