Some numbers about Mr. DLib’s Recommendations-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Recommendations and Clicks per Month (Mr. Dlib´s Recommender System as-a-service)

Six months ago, we launched Mr. DLib’s recommendations-as-a-service for Academia. Time, to look back and provide some numbers: Since September 2016, Mr. DLib´s recommender system has delivered 60,836,800 recommendations to our partner Sowiport, and Sowiport’s users have clicked 91,545 of the recommendations. This equals on overall click-through rate (CTR) of 0.15%. The figure shows the number of delivered recommendations and CTR by month (2016-09-08 to 2017-02-11).  CTR is rather low and there is a notable variance among the months (e.g. 0.21% in September and 0.10% in December). The variance may be caused by different algorithms we are experimenting with. In addition, recommendations are also delivered when web spiders such as Google Bot are crawling our partner website Sowiport.de. In contrast, clicks are logged with JavaScript, which is usually not executed by web spiders. Consequently, the CTR for the real ‘human interaction’ would be higher. A few days ago, we released a new JavaScript Client, which will probably lead to more reliable statistics.