TY - JOUR
T1 - The Upworthy Research Archive, a time series of 32,487 experiments in U.S. media
AU - Matias, J. Nathan
AU - Munger, Kevin
AU - Le Quere, Marianne Aubin
AU - Ebersole, Charles
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Good, Inc. for making this dataset available to the researchers so we could prepare it for scientific uses. The project received partial funding from the State University of New York Open Educational Resource fund. We appreciate support from Max Klein on the final sample-generation code. We are also grateful to the project’s advisors David Karpf, Helen Margetts, and Brian Nosek for advice on the creation of this archive.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12
Y1 - 2021/12
N2 - The pursuit of audience attention online has led organizations to conduct thousands of behavioral experiments each year in media, politics, activism, and digital technology. One pioneer of A/B tests was Upworthy.com, a U.S. media publisher that conducted a randomized trial for every article they published. Each experiment tested variations in a headline and image “package,” recording how many randomly-assigned viewers selected each variation. While none of these tests were designed to answer scientific questions, scientists can advance knowledge by meta-analyzing and data-mining the tens of thousands of experiments Upworthy conducted. This archive records the stimuli and outcome for every A/B test fielded by Upworthy between January 24, 2013 and April 30, 2015. In total, the archive includes 32,487 experiments, 150,817 experiment arms, and 538,272,878 participant assignments. The open access dataset is organized to support exploratory and confirmatory research, as well as meta-scientific research on ways that scientists make use of the archive.
AB - The pursuit of audience attention online has led organizations to conduct thousands of behavioral experiments each year in media, politics, activism, and digital technology. One pioneer of A/B tests was Upworthy.com, a U.S. media publisher that conducted a randomized trial for every article they published. Each experiment tested variations in a headline and image “package,” recording how many randomly-assigned viewers selected each variation. While none of these tests were designed to answer scientific questions, scientists can advance knowledge by meta-analyzing and data-mining the tens of thousands of experiments Upworthy conducted. This archive records the stimuli and outcome for every A/B test fielded by Upworthy between January 24, 2013 and April 30, 2015. In total, the archive includes 32,487 experiments, 150,817 experiment arms, and 538,272,878 participant assignments. The open access dataset is organized to support exploratory and confirmatory research, as well as meta-scientific research on ways that scientists make use of the archive.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41597-021-00934-7
DO - 10.1038/s41597-021-00934-7
M3 - Article
C2 - 34341340
AN - SCOPUS:85111731568
VL - 8
JO - Scientific data
JF - Scientific data
SN - 2052-4463
IS - 1
M1 - 195
ER -