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Effects of Popularity-Based News Recommendations (“Most-Viewed”) on Users' Exposure to Online News

This experimental study (N = 107) aims at investigating how the “most-viewed” recommendation features of online news affect users' news story choices, by employing an unobtrusive measurement for news exposure. The major findings clearly support the thesis that the presence of recommendations influences users' selection of news stories. First, the participants' self-reported assessment of the reasons for their story choices indicates that the incorporation of recommendations heightened their awareness of formal salience features. Second, these recommendations decreased the time for website exploration, and therefore increased the time available for reading news articles. Third, when the recommender system was available, approximately 50% of the participants' total story exposures came through the recommendation features. Fourth, those participants who were in the recommendation condition selected a larger number of the most-viewed stories featured in the recommender system than their counterparts in the no-recommendation condition; and a majority (about 80%) of the former group's access to those most-viewed stories was via the recommender system, in terms of either number or time. Last, the mean exposure time per recommended story did not differ across either recommendation conditions (with vs. without) or access routes (recommender system vs. front/topical sections).