For Your Eyes Only: Consuming vs. Sharing Content

This paper analyzes two types of user interactions with online content: (1) private engagement with content, measured by page-views and click-through rate; and (2) social engagement, measured by the number of shares on Facebook as well as share-rate. Based on more than a billion data points across hundreds of publishers worldwide and two time periods, it is shown that the correlation between these signals is generally low. Potential reasons for the low correlation are discussed, and the notion of private-social dissonance is defined. A more in-depth analysis shows that the dissonance between private engagement and social engagement consistently depends on content category. Categories such as Sex, Crime and Celebrities have higher private engagement than social engagement. On the other hand, categories such as Books, Careers and Music have higher social engagement than private engagement. In addition to the offline analysis, a model which utilizes the different signals was trained and deployed on a live recommendation system. The resulting weights ranked the social signal lower than clickthrough rate. The results are relevant for publishers, content marketers, architects of recommendation systems and researchers who wish to use social signals in order to measure and predict user engagement.