Online information retrieval behaviour and economics of attention

The purpose of this paper is to analyse users’ attitudes towards online information retrieval and processing. The aim is to identify the characteristics of information that better capture the attention of the users and to provide evidence for the information retrieval behaviour of the users by studying online photo archives as information units.

The paper analyses a unique quasi-experimental data of photo archive access counts collected by the author from an online newspaper. In addition to access counts of each photo in 500 randomly chosen photo galleries, characteristics of the photo galleries are also recorded. Survival (duration) analysis is used in order to analyse the factors affecting the share of the photo gallery viewed by a certain proportion of the initial number of viewers.

The results of the survival analysis indicate that users are impatient in case of longer photo galleries; they lose attention faster and stop viewing earlier when gallery length is uncertain; they are attracted by keywords and initial presentation and they give more credit to specific rather than general information categories.

Results of the study offer applicable implications for information providers, especially on the online domain. In order to attract more attention, entities can engage in targeted information provision by taking into account people’s attitude towards information retrieval and processing as presented in this paper.

This paper uses a unique data set in a quasi-experimental setting in order to identify the characteristics of online information that users are attracted to.