Popularity, Novelty and Attention

TL;DR

This paper investigates how popularity and novelty influence user attention on dynamic websites by comparing three strategies, revealing phase transition-like behavior based on novelty decay rates.

Contribution

It introduces and compares three attention-maximizing strategies, analyzing their effectiveness relative to novelty decay and identifying a phase transition phenomenon.

Findings

Popularity and novelty strategies perform differently depending on decay rates.

The optimal strategy depends on the rate of novelty decay.

A phase transition-like change occurs in strategy effectiveness at a critical decay rate.

Abstract

We analyze the role that popularity and novelty play in attracting the attention of users to dynamic websites. We do so by determining the performance of three different strategies that can be utilized to maximize attention. The first one prioritizes novelty while the second emphasizes popularity. A third strategy looks myopically into the future and prioritizes stories that are expected to generate the most clicks within the next few minutes. We show that the first two strategies should be selected on the basis of the rate of novelty decay, while the third strategy performs sub-optimally in most cases. We also demonstrate that the relative performance of the first two strategies as a function of the rate of novelty decay changes abruptly around a critical value, resembling a phase transition in the physical world. 1