Drivers of Popularity of Online Information: Content, Context and Psychological Processes

This paper aims to study how people utilize (search for, choose, process, and evaluate) information provided on online domains, emphasizing the balance between context identifiers and the actual content of information and the psychological processes. The study assesses the popularity of online provided materials, TED Talks, in relation to the length of information, user ratings, and several content-related features. The paper employs a comprehensive naturalistic data set that covers the titles, duration, viewer-assigned ratings/tags, transcripts, various content identifiers, and popularity (number of views) of 2685 TED Talks. The results reveal the relevance of both content and context-related factors, as well as psychological processes, on the popularity of the talks. On the context side, using certain words in the title and the text, optimizing the talk pace and the length of the talk; on the content side, carefully incorporating rhetorical features are major factors that influence the popularity of the talks. On the psychological processes front, the popularity of talks is associated with positive emotions and anxiety among affective processes, and insight and tentativeness among cognitive processes.