Digg Stories Bored You After An Hour

The analysis of Digg by researchers Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs in Palo Alto discovered a couple of concepts about the site, as noted in a report at New Scientist Tech.

First, Diggers make great lab rats:

The team say that Digg provides an ideal "natural laboratory" for observing the collective behaviour of online news readers. This is because the choice of links on Digg, and the prominence these are given, is determined by users.

Second, stories don’t hold Digg attention spans for very long:

Through a statistical analysis of the site, the researchers discovered that just a handful of stories hog most people’s attention and most links seem to lose their appeal in just 69 minutes.

Wu and Huberman say the finding could perhaps help website designers find new ways to keep people interested when faced with an avalanche of information.

Plenty of websites love to get a rush of Digg attention. There’s nothing quite like several thousand people hitting a web page at once to help boost the page view metrics. Digg users have engaged in a running battle with the SEO crowd over attempts to game Digg for this kind of attention.

That attention doesn’t last for long, not at 69 minutes a shot.

To find that number, the researchers dug into the 29,864 most popular stories on Digg for 2006. The report said the histogram of that data followed a ‘log-normal‘ distribution.

In more easily digestible language, it means that the majority of stories receive relatively few votes while just a few get the majority of clicks. Which is how Digg operates. As the researchers looked closer at 1,110 stories in January 2006, they found the Digg rate slows down over time, the 69 minute figure they cited as a measure of a story fading in popularity.

Again, that could be just a function of stories moving off Digg’s front page. The researchers think it can be interpreted as the collective "attention span" of Digg users. Considering the youthfulness of Digg’s userbase, that makes the 69 minute figure a lot funnier than Wu and Huberman probably intended.

They’ll probably see that for themselves once their research hits Digg.

In conducting the reserch, Poynter enlisted nearly 600 regular readers in four markets, which is a pretty good sized sample. They gauged the eye patterns of readers from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, The St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and the Philadelphia Daily News.

The complete report of the study’s findings won’t be released until June, but Poynter has already come forward with some very interesting findings. Here is a complete overview of the online attention span study.

One of the major findings from the eye tracking study centers on amount of text read for online readers versus print readers:

People in our study selected what they wanted to read, of course, and then … they read a lot! We were amazed by these numbers.

A big surprise was that a much larger percentage of story text was read online than in print.

To look at a comparison, on average, online readers read 77 percent of what they chose to read. Broadsheet readers read an average of 62 percent. Tabloid readers read an average of 57 percent.

For a medium that’s notorious for producing users with short attention spans, it appears that the Internet is actually more conducive to reading than originally anticipated. The continuous flow of web pages may have something to do with this trend, as readers aren’t plagued by the spacing limits of traditional print publications such as newspapers and magazines.

Another theory is that online readers are, by nature, more focused on seeking out material. Your average household has a newspaper delivered daily and reading it is more an act of leisure at the end of the day, whereas surfing for news online reflects a mindset of greater intentionality.

Format also played a large factor in story retention:

The prototype portion of our study showed the value of alternative story forms as they related to comprehension and retention of information. By alternative, we mean things like a Q&A, a timeline, a short sidebar or a list.

Subjects were asked to read one of six different versions of a story about the spread of bird flu.

At the end of the test, subjects were quizzed about the story in an exit interview.

In both the print and online, subjects who answered the most questions correctly had read the version of the story with the most alternative structure — no traditional narrative.

This offers an even greater incentive for online content producers to continue developing new and innovative ways to deliver story items to readers. Print journalism is pretty much locked in to its particular delivery format, so Internet publications should continue looking for alternative methods of developing content for readers, as the Poynter study reflects increased interest and retention in that regard.