Online news media sometimes use misleading headlines to lure users to open the news article. These catchy headlines that attract users but disappointed them at the end, are called Clickbaits. Because of the importance of automatic clickbait detection in online medias, lots of machine learning methods were proposed and employed to find the clickbait headlines. In this research, a model using deep learning methods is proposed to find the clickbaits in Clickbait Challenge 2017's dataset. The proposed model gained the first rank in the Clickbait Challenge 2017 in terms of Mean Squared Error. Also, data analytics and visualization techniques are employed to explore and discover the provided dataset to get more insight from the data.
Two content marketing platforms and millions of headlines were studied to find features that contribute to increasing users’ engagement and change of unsubscribed readers into subscribers. This study suggested that clickbait techniques may increase the users’ engagement temporarily @cite_15 .
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Online content publishers often use catchy headlines for their articles in order to attract users to their websites. These headlines, popularly known as clickbaits, exploit a user’s curiosity gap and lure them to click on links that often disappoint them. Existing methods for automatically detecting clickbaits rely on heavy feature engineering and domain knowledge. Here, we introduce a neural network architecture based on Recurrent Neural Networks for detecting clickbaits. Our model relies on distributed word representations learned from a large unannotated corpora, and character embeddings learned via Convolutional Neural Networks. Experimental results on a dataset of news headlines show that our model outperforms existing techniques for clickbait detection with an accuracy of 0.98 with F1-score of 0.98 and ROC-AUC of 0.99. Online content publishers often use catchy headlines for their articles in order to attract users to their websites. These headlines, popularly known as clickbaits, exploit a user's curiosity gap and lure them to click on links that often disappoint them. Existing methods for automatically detecting clickbaits rely on heavy feature engineering and domain knowledge. Here, we introduce a neural network architecture based on Recurrent Neural Networks for detecting clickbaits. Our model relies on distributed word representations learned from a large unannotated corpora, and character embeddings learned via Convolutional Neural Networks. Experimental results on a dataset of news headlines show that our model outperforms existing techniques for clickbait detection with an accuracy of 0.98 with F1-score of 0.98 and ROC-AUC of 0.99. The use of alluring headlines (clickbait) to tempt the readers has become a growing practice nowadays. For the sake of existence in the highly competitive media industry, most of the on-line media including the mainstream ones, have started following this practice. Although the wide-spread practice of clickbait makes the reader's reliability on media vulnerable, a large scale analysis to reveal this fact is still absent. In this paper, we analyze 1.67 million Facebook posts created by 153 media organizations to understand the extent of clickbait practice, its impact and user engagement by using our own developed clickbait detection model. The model uses distributed sub-word embeddings learned from a large corpus. The accuracy of the model is 98.3 . Powered with this model, we further study the distribution of topics in clickbait and non-clickbait contents. Clickbait (headlines) make use of misleading titles that hide critical information from or exaggerate the content on the landing target pages to entice clicks. As clickbaits often use eye-catching wording to attract viewers, target contents are often of low quality. Clickbaits are especially widespread on social media such as Twitter, adversely impacting user experience by causing immense dissatisfaction. Hence, it has become increasingly important to put forward a widely applicable approach to identify and detect clickbaits. In this paper, we make use of a dataset from the clickbait challenge 2017 (clickbait-challenge.com) comprising of over 21,000 headlines titles, each of which is annotated by at least five judgments from crowdsourcing on how clickbait it is. We attempt to build an effective computational clickbait detection model on this dataset. We first considered a total of 331 features, filtered out many features to avoid overfitting and improve the running time of learning, and eventually selected the 60 most important features for our final model. Using these features, Random Forest Regression achieved the following results: MSE=0.035 MSE, Accuracy=0.82, and F1-sore=0.61 on the clickbait class. The use of deceptive techniques in user-generated video portals is ubiquitous. Unscrupulous uploaders deliberately mislabel video descriptors aiming at increasing their views and subsequently their ad revenue. This problem, usually referred to as "clickbait," may severely undermine user experience. In this work, we study the clickbait problem on YouTube by collecting metadata for 206k videos. To address it, we devise a deep learning model based on variational autoencoders that supports the diverse modalities of data that videos include. The proposed model relies on a limited amount of manually labeled data to classify a large corpus of unlabeled data. Our evaluation indicates that the proposed model offers improved performance when compared to other conventional models. Our analysis of the collected data indicates that YouTube recommendation engine does not take into account clickbait. Thus, it is susceptible to recommending misleading videos to users. Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93 accuracy in detecting and 89 accuracy in blocking clickbaits. Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long-run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93 accuracy in detecting and 89 accuracy in blocking clickbaits. Clickbaits are articles with misleading titles, exaggerating the content on the landing page. Their goal is to entice users to click on the title in order to monetize the landing page. The content on the landing page is usually of low quality. Their presence in user homepage stream of news aggregator sites (e.g., Yahoo news, Google news) may adversely impact user experience. Hence, it is important to identify and demote or block them on homepages. In this paper, we present a machine-learning model to detect clickbaits. We use a variety of features and show that the degree of informality of a web-page (as measured by different metrics) is a strong indicator of it being a clickbait. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our approach and analyze properties of clickbait and non-clickbait articles. Our model achieves high performance (74.9 F-1 score) in predicting clickbaits. The purpose of a clickbait is to make a link so appealing that people click on it. However, the content of such articles is often not related to the title, shows poor quality, and at the end leaves the reader unsatisfied. To help the readers, the organizers of the clickbait challenge (this http URL) asked the participants to build a machine learning model for scoring articles with respect to their "clickbaitness". In this paper we propose to solve the clickbait problem with an ensemble of Linear SVM models, and our approach was tested successfully in the challenge: it showed great performance of 0.036 MSE and ranked 3rd among all the solutions to the contest. In our study, we investigate the effectiveness of different models to the purchasing behaviour at YOOCHOOSE website. This paper provide a direct method in modeling the buying pattern in a clicking session by simply using the time-stamp of the clicks and show that the result is comparable to using more massive feature engineering that requires session summarizing. Our proposed method requires much lesser feature engineering and more natural modeling of the click events directly in a typical purchasing session in e-commerce. Tabloid journalism is often criticized for its propensity for exaggeration, sensationalization, scare-mongering, and otherwise producing misleading and low quality news. As the news has moved online, a new form of tabloidization has emerged: ?clickbaiting.? ?Clickbait? refers to ?content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page? [?clickbait,? n.d.] and has been implicated in the rapid spread of rumor and misinformation online. This paper examines potential methods for the automatic detection of clickbait as a form of deception. Methods for recognizing both textual and non-textual clickbaiting cues are surveyed, leading to the suggestion that a hybrid approach may yield best results. This paper presents the results and conclusions of our participation in the Clickbait Challenge 2017 on automatic clickbait detection in social media. We first describe linguistically-infused neural network models and identify informative representations to predict the level of clickbaiting present in Twitter posts. Our models allow to answer the question not only whether a post is a clickbait or not, but to what extent it is a clickbait post e.g., not at all, slightly, considerably, or heavily clickbaity using a score ranging from 0 to 1. We evaluate the predictive power of models trained on varied text and image representations extracted from tweets. Our best performing model that relies on the tweet text and linguistic markers of biased language extracted from the tweet and the corresponding page yields mean squared error (MSE) of 0.04, mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.16 and R2 of 0.43 on the held-out test data. For the binary classification setup (clickbait vs. non-clickbait), our model achieved F1 score of 0.69. We have not found that image representations combined with text yield significant performance improvement yet. Nevertheless, this work is the first to present preliminary analysis of objects extracted using Google Tensorflow object detection API from images in clickbait vs. non-clickbait Twitter posts. Finally, we outline several steps to improve model performance as a part of the future work. In this paper we focus on estimating the post-click engagement on native ads by predicting the dwell time on the corresponding ad landing pages. To infer relationships between features of the ads and dwell time we resort to the application of survival analysis techniques, which allow us to estimate the distribution of the length of time that the user will spend on the ad. This information is then integrated into the ad ranking function with the goal of promoting the rank of ads that are likely to be clicked and consumed by users (dwell time greater than a given threshold). The online evaluation over live traffic shows that considering post-click engagement has a consistent positive effect on both CTR, decreases the number of bounces and increases the average dwell time, hence leading to a better user post-click experience. The impact of continually evolving digital technologies and the proliferation of communications and content has now been widely acknowledged to be central to understanding our world. What is less acknowledged is that this is based on the successful arousing of curiosity both at the collective and individual levels. Advertisers, communication professionals and news editors are in constant competition to capture attention of the digital population perennially shifty and distracted. This paper, tries to understand how curiosity works in the digital world by attempting the first ever work done on quantifying human curiosity, basing itself on various theories drawn from humanities and social sciences. Curious communication pushes people to spot, read and click the message from their social feed or any other form of online presentation. Our approach focuses on measuring the strength of the stimulus to generate reader curiosity by using unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms, but is also informed by philosophical, psychological, neural and cognitive studies on this topic. Manually annotated news headlines - clickbaits - have been selected for the study, which are known to have drawn huge reader response. A binary classifier was developed based on human curiosity (unlike the work done so far using words and other linguistic features). Our classifier shows an accuracy of 97 . This work is part of the research in computational humanities on digital politics quantifying the emotions of curiosity and outrage on digital media. Clicks on search results are the most widely used behavioral signals for predicting search satisfaction. Even though clicks are correlated with satisfaction, they can also be noisy. Previous work has shown that clicks are affected by position bias, caption bias, and other factors. A popular heuristic for reducing this noise is to only consider clicks with long dwell time, usually equaling or exceeding 30 seconds. The rationale is that the more time a searcher spends on a page, the more likely they are to be satisfied with its contents. However, having a single threshold value assumes that users need a fixed amount of time to be satisfied with any result click, irrespective of the page chosen. In reality, clicked pages can differ significantly. Pages have different topics, readability levels, content lengths, etc. All of these factors may affect the amount of time spent by the user on the page. In this paper, we study the effect of different page characteristics on the time needed to achieve search satisfaction. We show that the topic of the page, its length and its readability level are critical in determining the amount of dwell time needed to predict whether any click is associated with satisfaction. We propose a method to model and provide a better understanding of click dwell time. We estimate click dwell time distributions for SAT (satisfied) or DSAT (dissatisfied) clicks for different click segments and use them to derive features to train a click-level satisfaction model. We compare the proposed model to baseline methods that use dwell time and other search performance predictors as features, and demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significant improvements. Online news reading has become very popular as the web provides access to news articles from millions of sources around the world. A key challenge of news websites is to help users find the articles that are interesting to read. In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. For users who are logged in and have explicitly enabled web history, the recommendation system builds profiles of users' news interests based on their past click behavior. To understand how users' news interests change over time, we first conducted a large-scale analysis of anonymized Google News users click logs. Based on the log analysis, we developed a Bayesian framework for predicting users' current news interests from the activities of that particular user and the news trends demonstrated in the activity of all users. We combine the content-based recommendation mechanism which uses learned user profiles with an existing collaborative filtering mechanism to generate personalized news recommendations. The hybrid recommender system was deployed in Google News. Experiments on the live traffic of Google News website demonstrated that the hybrid method improves the quality of news recommendation and increases traffic to the site. Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity. In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity and how those features may change on this http URL, a social platform used commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be more popular than posts with the original article title. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for news recommendation. Online personalized news recommendation is a highly challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of news features and user preferences. Although some online recommendation models have been proposed to address the dynamic nature of news recommendation, these methods have three major issues. First, they only try to model current reward (e.g., Click Through Rate). Second, very few work consider to use user feedback other than click no click labels (e.g., how frequent user returns) to help improve recommendation. Third, these methods tend to keep recommending similar news to users, which may cause users to get bored. Therefore, to address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Deep Q-Learning based recommendation framework, which can model future reward explicitly. We further consider user return pattern as a supplement to click no click label in order to capture more user feedback information. In addition, an effective exploration strategy is incorporated to find new attractive news for users. Extensive experiments are conducted on the offline dataset and online production environment of Chinese Bing News and have shown the superior performance of our methods. Clickbait has grown to become a nuisance to social media users and social media operators alike. Malicious content publishers misuse social media to manipulate as many users as possible to visit their websites using clickbait messages. Machine learning technology may help to handle this problem, giving rise to automatic clickbait detection. To accelerate progress in this direction, we organized the Clickbait Challenge 2017, a shared task inviting the submission of clickbait detectors for a comparative evaluation. A total of 13 detectors have been submitted, achieving significant improvements over the previous state of the art in terms of detection performance. Also, many of the submitted approaches have been published open source, rendering them reproducible, and a good starting point for newcomers. While the 2017 challenge has passed, we maintain the evaluation system and answer to new registrations in support of the ongoing research on better clickbait detectors. Despite the increasing popularity of viral marketing, factors critical to such a new communication medium remain largely unknown. This paper examines one of the critical factors, namely Internet users' motivations to pass along online content. Conceptualizing the act of forwarding online content as a special case of a more general communication behavior, we identify four potential motivations: (1) the need to be part of a group, (2) the need to be individualistic, (3) the need to be altruistic, and (4) the need for personal growth. Using a survey of young adults, we examine the relationship between these motivations and the frequency of passing along online content. We also investigate if high trait curiosity can indirectly lead to more forwarding by increasing the amount of online content consumed. Results show that Internet users, who are more individualistic and or more altruistic, tend to forward more online content than others.