User engagement in online news: Under the scope of sentiment, interest

Online content providers, like news portals and social media platforms, constantly seek new ways to attract large shares of online attention by keeping their users engaged. A common challenge is to identify which aspects of online interaction influence user engagement the most. In this article, through an analysis of a news article collection obtained from Yahoo! News, we demonstrate that news articles exhibit considerable variation in terms of the sentimentality and polarity of their content, depending on factors like news provider and genre. Moreover, through a laboratory study, we observe the effect of sentimentality and polarity of news and comments on a set of subjective and objective measures of engagement. In particular, we show that attention, affect, and gaze differ across news of varying interestingness. As part of our study, we also explore methods that exploit the sentiments expressed in user comments to reorder the lists of comments displayed in news pages. Our results indicate that user engagement can be anticipated if we account for the sentimentality and polarity of the content, as well as other factors that drive attention and inspire human curiosity.