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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Attention allocation in information-rich environments
T2 - the case of news aggregators
AU - Dellarocas, Chrysanthos
AU - Sutanto, Juliana
AU - Calin, Mihai
AU - Palme, Elia
PY - 2016/9
Y1 - 2016/9
N2 - News aggregators have emerged as an important component of digital content ecosystems, attracting traffic by hosting curated collections of links to third party content, but also inciting conflict with content producers.Aggregators provide titles and short summaries (snippets) of articles they link to. Content producers claim that their presence deprives them of traffic that would otherwise flow to their sites. In light of this controversy, we conduct a series of field experiments whose objective is to provide insight with respect to how readers allocate their attention between a news aggregator and the original articles it links to. Our experiments are based on manipulating elements of the user interface of a Swiss mobile news aggregator. We examine how key design parameters, such as the length of the text snippet that an aggregator displays about articles, the presence of associated images, and the number of related articles on the same story, affect a reader’s propensity to visit the content producer's site and read the full article. Our findings suggest the presence of a substitution relationship between the amount of information that aggregators offer about articles and the probability that readers will opt to read the full articles at the content producer sites. Interestingly, however, when several related article outlines compete for user attention, a longer snippet and the inclusion of an image increase the probability that an article will be chosen over its competitors.
AB - News aggregators have emerged as an important component of digital content ecosystems, attracting traffic by hosting curated collections of links to third party content, but also inciting conflict with content producers.Aggregators provide titles and short summaries (snippets) of articles they link to. Content producers claim that their presence deprives them of traffic that would otherwise flow to their sites. In light of this controversy, we conduct a series of field experiments whose objective is to provide insight with respect to how readers allocate their attention between a news aggregator and the original articles it links to. Our experiments are based on manipulating elements of the user interface of a Swiss mobile news aggregator. We examine how key design parameters, such as the length of the text snippet that an aggregator displays about articles, the presence of associated images, and the number of related articles on the same story, affect a reader’s propensity to visit the content producer's site and read the full article. Our findings suggest the presence of a substitution relationship between the amount of information that aggregators offer about articles and the probability that readers will opt to read the full articles at the content producer sites. Interestingly, however, when several related article outlines compete for user attention, a longer snippet and the inclusion of an image increase the probability that an article will be chosen over its competitors.
KW - digital content
KW - media curation
KW - media economics
KW - news aggregator
KW - click-through rate
U2 - 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2237
DO - 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2237
M3 - Journal article
VL - 62
SP - 2543
EP - 2562
JO - Management Science
JF - Management Science
SN - 0025-1909
IS - 9
ER -