  Dwell time has been widely used in various fields to evaluate content quality
and user engagement. Although many studies shown that content with long dwell
time is good quality, contents with short dwell time have not been discussed in
detail. We hypothesize that content with short dwell time is not always low
quality and does not always have low user engagement, but is instead related to
user interest. The purpose of this study is to clarify the meanings of short
dwell time browsing in mobile news application. First, we analyze the relation
of short dwell time to user interest using large scale user behavior logs from
a mobile news application. This analysis was conducted on a vector space based
on users click histories and then users and articles were mapped in the same
space. The users with short dwell time are concentrated on a specific position
in this space; thus, the length of dwell time is related to their interest.
Moreover, we also analyze the characteristics of short dwell time browsing by
excluding these browses from their click histories. Surprisingly, excluding
short dwell time click history, it was found that short dwell time click
history included some aspect of user interest in 30.87% of instances where the
cluster of users changed. These findings demonstrate that short dwell time does
not always indicate a low level of user engagement, but also level of user
interest.
