Analysis of User Dwell Time by Category in News Application

TL;DR

This study analyzes how user dwell time varies across news categories in a smartphone app, revealing distinct patterns and correlations with news length, and highlighting that users often glean sufficient information from titles in brief visits.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of dwell time characteristics by news category and explores the relationship between dwell time and news length, which was previously not well understood.

Findings

Different dwell time trends observed across categories.

Political news shows highest correlation between dwell time and length.

Users often extract enough information from titles during short visits.

Abstract

Dwell time indicates how long a user looked at a page, and this is used especially in fields where ratings from users such as search engines, recommender systems, and advertisements are important. Despite the importance of this index, however, its characteristics are not well known. In this paper, we analyze the dwell time of news pages according to category in smartphone application. Our aim is to clarify the characteristics of dwell time and the relation between length of news page and dwell time, for each category. The results indicated different dwell time trends for each category. For example, the social category had fewer news pages with shorter dwell time than peaks, compared to other categories, and there were a few news pages with remarkably short dwell time. We also found a large difference by category in the correlation value between dwell time and length of news page. Specifically, political news had the highest correlation value and technology news had the lowest. In addition, we found that a user tends to get sufficient information about the news content from the news title in short dwell times.