“If it bleeds, it leads” – bloody headlines are good for circulation – is an old adage among newspaper editors. This originally rather intuitive knowledge has often been the subject of scientific investigations. For example, test subjects were presented with various messages under laboratory conditions and their reactions to them were observed. Or researchers counted how often positive or negative news was shared by users on social media.
The Internet is full of hot IT news and stale Pr0n. In between there are always gems that are too good for /dev/null.
Perhaps the best thing would be to print and measure a newspaper in different versions with a negative or positive lead story, which one is bought more frequently at the kiosk. But that is obviously too expensive. The Internet offers new, cheaper options, which an international research team with the participation of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich has now used.
It used datasets from the English-language news portal Upworthy.com, which experimented with different variations of headlines for its articles. The team has now published the results of their counts in Nature. The study is based on 370 million page impressions and 5.7 million clicks on almost 23,000 articles with headline variants from the end of January 2013 to mid-April 2015. The keywords that appear in it, such as “love” or “bad”, are classified according to the stipulations of the analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.
Effectively different depending on the topic
The click rates, i.e. the clicks of the readership measured in terms of the number of impressions (CTR), varied between zero and almost 15 percent. On average, a single negative keyword could significantly increase the click rate, from around 1.4 to 2.3 percent. It was about words like “wrong”, “bad” or “awful”. “Positive” words like “love”, “pretty” and “beautiful” did not encourage readers to click on an article. Longer headlines – with potentially more negative vocabulary – increased click-through rates. If the headlines appealed to emotions, effects could also be noted: sadness was good for clicks, joy less so; Anger, on the other hand, provided ambiguous results.
The effect of negative vocabulary varied in size depending on the subject area. He was strongest for news from the areas of politics and business, but he was also clearly visible in the topics “people”, “education and schools” and “LGBT” typical of Upworthy, but less so in “entertainment” and “women’s rights and feminism”. “. “But the special thing about our study is that we use it to see private consumption, so which stories the readers click on out of sheer interest,” explains Stefan Feuerriegel, Director of the Institute of AI in Management at LMU.
Upworthy was considered the fastest growing website in the years just after its inception in 2012. At the time, the platform was already using analytics systems to find out which headlines were best suited to draw attention to certain topics. Feuerriegel points to an irony of the subject of research: “Upworthy’s goal is to primarily spread positive news.”
If you have read up to here, you will now find out that the headline of this WTF article is also being experimented with, because four variants are being played out. You will soon find out how the experiment ends here.
(anw)
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