WHAT MAKES US CLICK? - Modelling and Predicting the Appeal of News Articles

Elena Hensinger, Ilias Flaounas, Nello Cristianini

2012

Abstract

We model readers’ preferences for online news, and use these models to compare different news outlets with each other. The models are based on linear scoring functions, and are inferred by exploiting aggregate behavioural information about readers’ click choices for textual content of six given news outlets over one year of time. We generate one model per outlet, and while not extremely accurate – due to limited information – these models are shown to predict the click choices of readers, as well as to being stable over time. We use those six audience preference models in several ways: to compare how the audiences’ preferences of different outlets relate to each other; to score different news topics with respect to user appeal; to rank a large number of other news outlets with respect to their content appeal to all audiences; and to explain this measure by relating it to other metrics. We discover that UK tabloids and the website of the “People” magazine contain more appealing content for all audiences than broadsheet newspapers, news aggregators and newswires, and that this measure of readers’ preferences correlates with a measure of linguistic subjectivity at the level of outlets.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hensinger E., Flaounas I. and Cristianini N. (2012). WHAT MAKES US CLICK? - Modelling and Predicting the Appeal of News Articles . In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM, ISBN 978-989-8425-99-7, pages 41-50. DOI: 10.5220/0003728000410050

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icpram12,
author={Elena Hensinger and Ilias Flaounas and Nello Cristianini},
title={WHAT MAKES US CLICK? - Modelling and Predicting the Appeal of News Articles},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM,},
year={2012},
pages={41-50},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003728000410050},
isbn={978-989-8425-99-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods - Volume 2: ICPRAM,
TI - WHAT MAKES US CLICK? - Modelling and Predicting the Appeal of News Articles
SN - 978-989-8425-99-7
AU - Hensinger E.
AU - Flaounas I.
AU - Cristianini N.
PY - 2012
SP - 41
EP - 50
DO - 10.5220/0003728000410050