  Practical news feed platforms generate a hybrid list of news articles and
advertising items (e.g., products, services, or information) and many platforms
optimize the position of news articles and advertisements independently.
However, they should be arranged with careful consideration of each other, as
we show in this study, since user behaviors toward advertisements are
significantly affected by the news articles. This paper investigates the effect
of news articles on users' ad consumption and shows the dependency between news
and ad effectiveness. We conducted a service log analysis and showed that
sessions with high-quality news article exposure had more ad consumption than
those with low-quality news article exposure. Based on this result, we
hypothesized that exposure to high-quality articles will lead to a high ad
consumption rate. Thus, we conducted million-scale A/B testing to investigate
the effect of high-quality articles on ad consumption, in which we prioritized
high-quality articles in the ranking for the treatment group. The A/B test
showed that the treatment group's ad consumption, such as the number of clicks,
conversions, and sales, increased significantly while the number of article
clicks decreased. We also found that users who prefer a social or economic
topic had more ad consumption by stratified analysis. These insights regarding
news articles and advertisements will help optimize news and ad effectiveness
in rankings considering their mutual influence.
