Analysis on the relationship between diversity of consumed news articles and user activity

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated relationships between the diversity of news articles and various user activity by analyzing user logs of a popular news app. Following previous study, we quantitatively define the diversity of consumed news articles for each user by using vector representation for each article. We found that users with high diversity are more likely to continue using the app and consume a higher number of articles and visit the app more often. We also found that the use of various logics with different degree of personalization which are responsible for placing articles in the app play a role in determining diversity for each user. We conclude that the diversity of consumed news articles becomes higher when the users consume news articles demonstrated by multiple logics in a well-balanced way. This study implies that encouraging users to consume diverse contents may result in increase of active users and user activity in the long run for a web service.