Why does attention to web articles fall with time?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decline in web article attention over time, revealing a power-law decay in access rates and linking it to the article's position on website pages rather than novelty or human activity theories.

Contribution

It demonstrates that attention decay follows a power law and attributes this pattern primarily to the article's decreasing visibility on website front pages.

Findings

Access rate follows an inverse power law over time.

Decay exponents vary between 0.6 and 3.2 across blogs.

Visibility drop explains attention decline better than novelty theories.

Abstract

We analyze access statistics of a hundred and fifty blog entries and news articles, for periods of up to three years. Access rate falls as an inverse power of time passed since publication. The power law holds for periods of up to thousand days. The exponents are different for different blogs and are distributed between 0.6 and 3.2. We argue that the decay of attention to a web article is caused by the link to it first dropping down the list of links on the website's front page, and then disappearing from the front page and its subsequent movement further into background. The other proposed explanations that use a decaying with time novelty factor, or some intricate theory of human dynamics cannot explain all of the experimental observations.