Negativity drives online news consumption (Show of hands, who is guilty of this here?) 🙋🏻

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4

YO! For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%

Abstract

Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated ∼5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.

Main

The newsroom phrase ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ was coined to reflect the intuition among journalists that stories about crime, bloodshed and tragedy sell more newspapers than stories about good news. However, a large portion of news readership now occurs online—the motivation to sell papers transformed into a motivation to keep readers clicking on new articles. In the United States, 89% of adults get at least some of their news online, and reliance on the Internet as a news source is increasing. Even so, most users spend less than 5 minutes per month on all of the top 25 news sites put together. Hence, online media is forced to compete for the extremely limited resource of reader attention.



A PDF!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4.pdf

If I get only a few rec's, suggest some negative words for the title!