  Readme in GitHub repositories serves as a preliminary source of information,
and thus helps developers in understanding about the projects, for reuse or
extension. Different types of contextual and structural content, which we refer
to as categories of the content and features in the content respectively, are
present in readme files, and could determine the extent of comprehension about
project. Consequently, the structural and contextual aspects of the content
could impact the project popularity. Studying the correlation between the
content and project popularity could help in focusing on the aspects that could
improve popularity, while designing the readme files. However, existing studies
explore the categories of content and types of features in readme files, and do
not explore their usefulness towards project popularity. Hence, we present an
empirical study to understand correlation between readme file content and
project popularity. We perform the study on 1950 readme files of public GitHub
projects, spanning across ten programming languages, and observe that readme
files in majority of the popular projects are well organised using lists and
images, and comprise links to external sources. Also, repositories with readme
files containing contribution guidelines and references were observed to be
associated with higher popularity.
