Anticipating Attention: On the Predictability of News Headline Tests

Headlines play an important role in both news audiences' attention decisions online and in news organizations' efforts to attract that attention. A large body of research focuses on developing generally applicable heuristics for more effective headline writing. In this work, we measure the importance of a number of theoretically motivated textual features to headline performance. Using a corpus of hundreds of thousands of headline A/B tests run by hundreds of news publishers, we develop and evaluate a machine-learned model to predict headline testing outcomes. We find that the model exhibits modest performance above baseline and further estimate an empirical upper bound for such content-based prediction in this domain, indicating an important role for non-content-based factors in test outcomes. Together, these results suggest that any particular headline writing approach has only a marginal impact, and that understanding reader behavior and headline context are key to predicting news attention decisions.