The effects of an experimental attention economy on the production and consumption of news headlines

Online news headlines play a vital role both in news production and news consumption: Readers rely on headlines to keep up-to-date and choose what to read. Producers, on the other hand, write headlines to attract attention and clicks in the attention economy. Specific language may benefit news headlines in this competition: Longer headlines, employing more emotional, negative, and concrete language, introducing an information gap, or even writing inaccurate headlines may be advantageous. Concerns include if the attention economy threatens the quality of news headlines. We experimentally investigated how different incentives – to attract clicks, or to inform – affect the language of news headlines, and how this influences consumption: In a two-stage experiment, a first group of participants (N=599) wrote headlines to be read by a second group (N=896), in different conditions. For example, in the “attention economy” condition, headline writers received a financial reward for each click to one of their headlines in a competitive consumption setting. Producers in this scenario were more likely to produce informationally incomplete and incongruent headlines, but such headlines did not get more clicks. On the other hand, headlines produced in an informativeness condition were rated as more informative by consumers. Contrary to our expectation, headlines that were rated as more informative were also more likely to be clicked. Our findings help to understand the downstream consequences of production incentives on content quality, and inform rethinking online information environments in the attention economy.