Who Does What on the Web: A Large-Scale Study of Browsing Behavior
By Sharad Goel, Jake M. Hofman, M. Irmak Sirer. 2012
166 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As the Web has become integrated into daily life, understanding how individuals spend their time online impacts domains ranging from public policy to marketing. It is difficult, however, to measure even simple aspects of browsing behavior via conventional methods---including surveys and site-level analytics---due to limitations of scale and scope. In part addressing these limitations, large-scale Web panel data are a relatively novel means for investigating patterns of Internet usage. In one of the largest studies of browsing behavior to date, we pair Web histories for 250,000 anonymized individuals with user-level demographics---including age, sex, race, education, and income---to investigate three topics. First, we examine how behavior changes as individuals spend more time online, showing that the heaviest users devote nearly twice as much of their time to social media relative to typical individuals. Second, we revisit the digital divide, finding that the frequency with which individuals turn to the Web for research, news, and healthcare is strongly related to educational background, but not as closely tied to gender and ethnicity. Finally, we demonstrate that browsing histories are a strong signal for inferring user attributes, including ethnicity and household income, a result that may be leveraged to improve ad targeting.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Communication
- Fernando Diaz
- Alexandra Olteanu
- Carlos Castillo
- Emre Kıcıman
- David M. J. Lazer
- Balachander Krishnamurthy
- Dean Eckles
- Itamar Rosenn
In Sociology and Political Science
- Alexandra Olteanu
- Fernando Diaz
- Carlos Castillo
- Emre Kıcıman
- Dean Eckles
- David M. J. Lazer
- Alan Mislove
- Cédric Sueur
Citations in the corpus
- Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “Further, people’s consumption behavior is correlated with their demographic attributes and other personal characteristics: Kosinski et al. (2013) links “likes” on Facebook with personal traits, while web page views vary across demographics, e.g., age, gender, race, income (Goel et al., 2012).”
- Measuring personalization of web search (2013, background): “Studies have shown that user demographics can be reliably inferred from browsing histories, which can be useful for personalizing content [18, 28].”
- Online and Social Media Data As an Imperfect Continuous Panel Survey (2016, methodology): “For example, [41] provides a host of self-reported online behavior with a traditional cross-sectional poll of Americans, while [42] examines variation in revealed preferences across demographic groups using web browsing logs from a large online panel.”
- Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption (2016, unknown): “6 Studies using actual browsing behavior tend to find that this number is quite a bit lower (Goel et al., 2012a; LaCour, 2013).”
- Social influence in social advertising: evidence from field experiments (2012, background): “5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.”