Three Metrics for Measuring User Engagement with Online Media and a YouTube Case Study
This work provides incremental tools for quantifying user interaction in online services like YouTube.
The paper introduced three metrics—Commenting frequency, Voting frequency, and Voting balance—to measure user engagement in online media, using a YouTube case study to show they are only moderately correlated with existing statistics.
This technical report discusses three metrics of user engagement with online media. They are Commenting frequency, Voting frequency, and Voting balance. These relative figures can be derived from established, basic statistics available for many services, prominently YouTube. The paper includes case a study of popular YouTube videos to illustrate the characteristics and usefulness of the measures. The study documents the range of observed values and their relationships. The empirical sample shows the three measures to be only moderately correlated with the original statistics despite the common numerators and denominators. The paper concludes by discussing future applications and the needs of the quantification of user interaction with new media services.