Why does attention to web articles fall with time?
This addresses the problem of understanding web content decay for publishers and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing power-law models.
The study analyzed access statistics of 150 blog entries and news articles over up to three years, finding that attention decays as an inverse power law with exponents ranging from 0.6 to 3.2. They attributed this decay to articles moving off front pages rather than novelty factors or human dynamics theories.
We analyze access statistics of a hundred and fifty blog entries and news articles, for periods of up to three years. Access rate falls as an inverse power of time passed since publication. The power law holds for periods of up to thousand days. The exponents are different for different blogs and are distributed between 0.6 and 3.2. We argue that the decay of attention to a web article is caused by the link to it first dropping down the list of links on the website's front page, and then disappearing from the front page and its subsequent movement further into background. The other proposed explanations that use a decaying with time novelty factor, or some intricate theory of human dynamics cannot explain all of the experimental observations.