Selective Attention to Commercial Information Displays in Globally Available Mobile Application

Abstract

The prevalence of mobile applications has revived research interest in examining the issue of how commercial information (e.g., adverts) can be displayed to yield click-throughs. Mixed perspectives are proposed over whether or not adverts should be integrated into the primary media content. By anchoring on the load theory of selective attention, this research proposes that user response (attention) to consistent adverts (i.e., adverts that are contextually consistent with the media content) is contingent on how they are displayed (intra- and inter-pages). This study subjected the worldwide users of a location-based mobile social networking application to random manipulations of intra-page and inter-page advert displays. The findings reveal that controlling for the geographical locations of the users, high click-through counts are obtained when consistent adverts are displayed at the early stage of application interaction (top position of the front page), but the effect diminishes as users scroll down to the bottom of front page and navigate to subsequent pages.