Net articles with negative and emotional titles turned out to be more likely to be clicked
In addition to television and newspapers, Internet media has become indispensable as an article medium for modern people. The title of net news is a factor that greatly affects whether users click on it, but research results have been announced that the click rate is higher for articles with titles that use negative words than positive words.
Negativity drives online news consumption | Nature Human Behavior
A research team led by Associate Professor Jay Van Babel of New York University conducted experiments using articles from the article site Upworthy , which was established in 2012. In the experiment, Upworthy editors devised 25 different titles for one article, randomly displayed those titles to Upworthy users, and recorded user reactions.
For example, an article title might contain the positive words, 'Wow! The Supreme Court made hundreds of us happy,' or 'Looking back on this in 10 years, I will be ashamed of what happened.' I think' was prepared including negative words.
Articles The number of articles was over 100,000, with 5.7 million clicks and over 370 million impressions. In terms of title variations, titles containing positive words were slightly more common than titles containing negative words. The most common positive words were 'love', 'cute' and 'beautiful', while the most common negative words were 'wrong', 'bad' and 'terrible'.
In our experiments, we found that titles with negative words had a higher click-through rate than titles with positive words. For titles with an average length of about 15 words or less, the click rate increased by 2.3% for each negative word added. When focusing on positive words, the click rate decreased by 1.0% for each additional positive word.
Since Upworthy is a media that originally sells 'positive news sites', it is thought that readers who read Upworthy's articles are looking for more positive content than readers of other news media. However, the research team notes that the click rate was higher for titles containing negative words.
Also, it seems that the influence of the image of the word changed depending on the genre of the article. For example, for titles related to 'political economy', 'LGBT', and 'child-raising and education', the higher the percentage of negative words, the higher the click rate. Especially in articles on political economy, the influence of negative words was strongly seen, so the research team said, ``People are more likely to consume political economy articles with negative titles, and people probably unintentionally They may have been selectively exposed to politically divisive articles, which may ultimately contribute to political polarization and factional conflict.'
Furthermore, when checking the feelings people have for words, it seems that 'sadness' increased the click rate of articles and 'joy' decreased the click rate of news.
The research team said, ``With misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories prevalent online, it is important to understand the biases that affect people's consumption of internet content. Profiting from negative words shows the need to understand the nuances of news consumption: knowing what features of an article attract people's attention can help improve internet literacy and transparency. It enables the practice of net news with
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