Analysis of Short Dwell Time in Relation to User Interest in a News Application

TL;DR

This study investigates the meaning of short dwell time in mobile news apps, revealing it can indicate user interest rather than low engagement, challenging traditional assumptions about dwell time as a quality metric.

Contribution

It introduces a vector space analysis linking short dwell time to user interest and shows that short dwell time can reflect genuine user engagement in news browsing.

Findings

Short dwell time correlates with user interest in a specific vector space.

Excluding short dwell time clicks still reveals user interest in 30.87% of cases.

Short dwell time does not necessarily imply low user engagement.

Abstract

Dwell time has been widely used in various fields to evaluate content quality and user engagement. Although many studies shown that content with long dwell time is good quality, contents with short dwell time have not been discussed in detail. We hypothesize that content with short dwell time is not always low quality and does not always have low user engagement, but is instead related to user interest. The purpose of this study is to clarify the meanings of short dwell time browsing in mobile news application. First, we analyze the relation of short dwell time to user interest using large scale user behavior logs from a mobile news application. This analysis was conducted on a vector space based on users click histories and then users and articles were mapped in the same space. The users with short dwell time are concentrated on a specific position in this space; thus, the length of dwell time is related to their interest. Moreover, we also analyze the characteristics of short dwell time browsing by excluding these browses from their click histories. Surprisingly, excluding short dwell time click history, it was found that short dwell time click history included some aspect of user interest in 30.87% of instances where the cluster of users changed. These findings demonstrate that short dwell time does not always indicate a low level of user engagement, but also level of user interest.