Big Web Colors: Analyzing the World Top Sites

Colors are obviously important for web sites, but how much? in this paper we try to study the problem of abstracting from the actual content, and analyze if and how colors in images have a higher-level fundamental importance. Focusing on the world top web sites, we collected a large pool (almost two millions) of images, and then investigated the relationships of colors with the attractiveness of a page. Can colors alone boost the success of a page, and in what terms? To answer this question we developed an experiment involving a large number of people, measuring how and how much colors affect a page, abstracting from the content. The results show that, rather surprisingly, colors do have a more fundamental significance that can be decoupled from the underlying shapes. We provide qualitative and quantitative insights on how important colors are, and how they actually impact the success of a site in terms of user perception.