Networked user engagement

Online providers frequently offer a variety of services, ranging from news to mail. These providers endeavour to keep users accessing and interacting with the sites offering these services, that is to engage users by spending time on these sites and returning regularly to them. The standard approach to evaluate engagement with a site is by measuring engagement metrics of each site separately. However, when assessing engagement within a network of sites, it is crucial to take into account the traffic between sites. This paper proposes a methodology for studying networked used engagement. We represent sites (nodes) and user traffic (edges) between them as a network, and apply complex network metrics to study networked user engagement. We demonstrate the value of these metrics when applied to 728 services offered by Yahoo!~with a sample of 2M users and a total of 25M online sessions.