Entertainment is an activity designed to give pleasure or relaxation to an audience - although in the case of a computer game the ‘audience’ may be only one person. [Wikipedia: Entertainment]. How do we measure the entertainment value of a social news website?

Entertainment: Rational and emotional interest
In ‘Four Reasons Why the Entertainment Niche is Great for Making Money’ Maki writes:

• Visitors arrive at your website to get something out of it and their preoccupations can be divided into emotional and rational interests. For instance, they either seek out specific content or absorb information so they can re-use it in their personal or professional life. This is a rational interest.
• At the other end of the spectrum, people will often visit a website because they want to be entertained. They don’t want to re-use information or apply it elsewhere, because they only seek pleasure or enjoyment on a surface level. This is an emotional interest.
• Of course, rational and emotional interests often intersect with one another. It is quite possible to have both an rational and emotional interest in a website. While these two factors aren’t mutually exclusive, it is apparent that some websites are designed to entertain while others are less visceral and more tailored towards fulfilling a specific visitor/informational need.

Great. The more emotion, the more entertainment. Hey, this reminds me of my time at Endemol here we used to say: ‘TV is emotion’. Now let’s look closer at Maki’s definition of social news websites.

Social News Websites
Maki also wrote ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Social News Websites’. You’ll have to write his post for more, but some of his words are:

• Social News websites are communities which allow its users to submit news stories, articles and media (videos/ pictures) and share them with other users or the general public. Some of these articles will be given more visibility, depending on various factors such as the number of user votes for each item.
• Apart from counting registered user votes, some social news websites employ human editors to determine the visibility of each news item. Certain stories will be removed from the website while others may be given a ‘featured‘ position if the story is highly relevant and news worthy.
• Social news websites can be divided into wide-focus or narrow-focus communities. Some of them only cater to a niche audience (e.g. marketers/ moms) and others cover just about every possible topic in a bid to appeal to a large audience.

Now we know what social news websites are about, and that the E-factor depends on offering emotional value. I came up with the following characteristics for judging a social news website’s E-factor.

Characteristics that fit rational use of Social News Websites
- Topics like: News, Science, Politics, Business, Technology, Health…
- Long commenting fields, creating room for reasoning and debating
- Saving and tagging websites is for the purpose of reusing them later
- There is a role for administrators

Characteristics that fit emotional use of Social News Websites
- Topics like: News, Sports, Music, Movies, Games, Humor, Lifestyle, Gossip, 18+
- Short commenting fields, leaving room for quick- ‘I like it!’ - messages only
- Save a website for the purpose of sharing it with friends, right now
- There is no role for administrators
- Pimp your profile possibilities
- Attention for images & videos

Yes, I know that I wrote the topic ‘News’ to fit both rational as emotional interests. News is infotainment. It shows that Maki’s point ‘ these two factors aren’t mutually exclusive’ is correct. I thank Maki for giving me inspiration and information to write about this subject

Other links:
48 Social News Websites: A List of General and Niche Social Media Communities
Top 10 Social News Mashup Sites
Wikipedia about Social bookmarking