Headlines and Performance Blendle Newsletter

This dataset was used for the analysis done in our study Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment.

This study focussed on the articles that were included in the newsletter of the online news kiosk Blendle. This daily newsletter includes a selection of approximately 12 articles. These articles are selected from all publications that are available on Blendle, and the articles are picked by Blendle's own editorial team.

The articles in the newsletter are listed with a rewritten headline. This means that the (rewritten) headline, as it appeared in the newsletter, is not the same as the original headline, as it appeared in the publication.

The dataset includes information on 1638 articles that have been listed in the Blendle newsletters between August 2015 and April 2016. For each article, the original headline, the rewritten headline and the performance of that item in the newsletter is given.

This performance is based on the CTR of that item, corrected for its position, and is basically the number of actual clicks divided by the number of expected clicks. A performance of 0 indicates an article that performed just as expected. A performance of > 0 means an article performed better than expected, and a performance of < 0 indicates an article that performed worse than expected.

For the sake of completeness, a link to the item on Blendle is provided as well. While these links were working at the time of publication, we can not guarantee that these links will keep working forever. A Blendle account is needed to access the articles, and the articles may cost money.