Personality and Website Choice

We find that preference for websites, like preference for objects in the offline world, is influenced by personality. We combine personality profiles and website choices of more than 160.000 users and investigate whether different websites attract audience of different personality. Using two independent sources of website choices, we show that website audiences often have distinct personality profiles, that there is a psychologically meaningful relationship between personality and preferences related to website and website categories, and that results are stable across independent data sources. Our findings are useful for researchers interested in website content personalization, text search, search result optimization and online marketing.

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