What is Stickiness

To make people stay at a particular Web site. It can be measured by time spent by the user per visit.

It is the quality of a website or social media which makes the viewers stay longer on it. It has benefit for the website/social media owner as it helps generate revenue.

The ability of a Web site to create both customer attraction and customer retention for the purpose of maximizing revenue or profit.

Site stickiness generally refers to the measurement of Web site attractiveness (Maity & Peters, 2005). It is the Web site’s ability to attract and hold users’ attention (Bhat, Bevans, & Sengupta, 2002).

A popular term for marketing a message. Short-term stickiness describes a Website’s ability to keep a user on the Website for as long as possible. Long-term stickiness refers to a Website’s ability to motivate a user to return to that particular Website.

The notion of ‘stickiness’ is shorthand for attracting visitors and keeping them there (Cohen, 2002). Festa (1999) notes NetRatings analyst Peggy O’Neill’s definition of stickiness as: “a measure of how engaging you are.” Sanchez (N.D.) similarly sees ‘stickiness’ as involving Web sites: “you want to go back to again and again”. Sanchez argues there is a cycle of stickiness—the more people visit your site, the more they rely on it and trust you, and the more you generate revenue. For Sanchez, then: “Stickiness = relationships = loyalty = revenues”. Haywood (2006) unpicks this notion of stickiness and relates it to Miller’s use of Gell’s notion of the ‘aesthetic trap’ (Miller, 2000). Miller examined the commercial and personal Web sites of Trinidadians, and noted the importance of the social in the design of the Web sites. Miller characterised the Web sites as creating ‘aesthetic traps’, where the notion of aesthetics refers broadly to the visual characteristics of Web sites: “as attempts to create aesthetic traps that express the social efficacy of their creators and attempt to draw others into social or commercial exchange with those who have objectified themselves through the internet” (Miller, 2000, p. 6). Miller also suggests that Web site visuals are also used to align the Web site’s audience with its creators, as a signal for an ‘appropriate’ audience (Haywood, 2006; Ellis and Haywood, 2006).