How Question Features Influence Page Traffic? A Comparative Study on General and Domain-specific Q&As

Authors

Alyssa Shuang Sha, Australian National UniversityFollow
Yingnan Shi, NU AFollow
Armin Haller, The Australian National UniversityFollow

Paper Number

1775

Abstract

Online Question and Answering services (Q&As) are becoming increasingly popular among information seekers. Users on these platforms identify their information needs by asking questions and interacting with others. Frequent user activities have led to a significant increase in traffic on Q&As, which motivates researchers to study the driving factors behind page traffic. The differences in the impacts of question quality features on the page traffic of domain-general and domain-specific Q&As remain unclear. To address this research gap, this study compares the traffic-driven effects of question features on general and domain-specific Q&A communities based on a database with more than 160,000 questions and their related 20 textual and non-textual features. Grey Relational Analysis is used to generate ranking lists for the two communities. The results indicate that review features drive the traffic of general Q&As the most, while user features are more significant in driving traffic for domain-specific Q&As.

Comments

Paper Number 1775

Recommended Citation

Sha, Alyssa Shuang; Shi, Yingnan; and Haller, Armin, "How Question Features Influence Page Traffic? A Comparative Study on General and Domain-specific Q&As" (2022). PACIS 2022 Proceedings. 265.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2022/265