Catching Audiences’ Attention through Narrative Sensory Cues on Digital Distribution Platforms

Advances in information technologies have radically altered the methods of distributing information goods, which in turn gives rise to the growing prominence of digital storytelling as a means of promoting products to their targeted audience through multimedia. To this end, we attempt to disentangle the effects of narrative sensory cues (i.e., character identifiability and plot imageability) from digital stories on audiences’ visual attention from the theoretical lens of narrative transportation. To do so, we plan to advance a machine learning procedure to simulate audiences’ visual attention. Findings from this study hence offer an in-depth appreciation of the impact of digital storytelling on the diffusion of information goods.