The Effect of News Article Quality on Ad Consumption

Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently. However, they should be arranged with careful consideration of each other, as we show in this study, since user behaviors toward advertisements are significantly affected by the news articles. This paper investigates the effect of news articles on users' ad consumption and shows the dependency between news and ad effectiveness. We conducted a service log analysis and showed that sessions with high-quality news article exposure had more ad consumption than those with low-quality news article exposure. Based on this result, we hypothesized that exposure to high-quality articles will lead to a high ad consumption rate. Thus, we conducted million-scale A/B testing to investigate the effect of high-quality articles on ad consumption, in which we prioritized high-quality articles in the ranking for the treatment group. The A/B test showed that the treatment group's ad consumption, such as the number of clicks, conversions, and sales, increased significantly while the number of article clicks decreased. We also found that users who prefer a social or economic topic had more ad consumption by stratified analysis. These insights regarding news articles and advertisements will help optimize news and ad effectiveness in rankings considering their mutual influence.

CS-lol: a Dataset of Viewer Comment with Scene in E-sports Live-streaming

Billions of live-streaming viewers share their opinions on scenes they are watching in real-time and interact with the event, commentators as well as other viewers via text comments. Thus, there is necessary to explore viewers' comments with scenes in E-sport live-streaming events. In this paper, we developed CS-lol, a new large-scale dataset containing comments from viewers paired with descriptions of game scenes in E-sports live-streaming. Moreover, we propose a task, namely viewer comment retrieval, to retrieve the viewer comments for the scene of the live-streaming event. Results on a series of baseline retrieval methods derived from typical IR evaluation methods show our task as a challenging task. Finally, we release CS-lol and baseline implementation to the research community as a resource.