How Do Global Audiences Take Shape? The Role of Institutions and Culture in Patterns of Web Use

Abstract

This study investigates the role of both cultural and technological factors in determining audience formation on a global scale. It integrates theories of media choice with theories of global cultural consumption and tests them by analyzing shared audience traffic between the world's 1,000 most popular websites. We find that language and geographic similarities are more powerful predictors of audience overlap than hyperlinks and genre similarity, highlighting the role of cultural structures in shaping global media use.

Cultural values and cross-cultural video consumption on YouTube

“…The eigenvector centrality of language [6] indicates that countries using more global languages (e.g., English) have greater cultural openness, consistent with the findings in previous studies ( b = .173, p < .05 for cultural betweenness; b = .190, p < .01 for cultural closeness) [7,8]. However, this effect largely disappears when cultural values are included in the model ( b = .092, p = .29 for cultural betweenness; b = .075, p = .18 for cultural closeness), indicating that cultural values are stronger predictors of cultural openness and capture most of the linguistic effect.…”

“…As a consequence, English as a lingua franca allows greater access to cultural diversity [6,8], compared to local languages such as Korean or Japanese. Following Ronen et al’s [6] algorithm, we computed eigenvector centrality of a country’s language.…”

Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication

“…One way of approaching the question of audience fragmentation versus audience duplication across media platforms and across different media systems is through the audience‐centric approach developed by James Webster and his collaborators (Taneja, ; Taneja & Webster, ; Webster, ; Webster & Ksiazek, ; Weeks et al, ; Yuan & Ksiazek, ). According to this stream of work, audiences within media environments can be characterized by placing them on a spectrum that ranges from “fragmented” to “duplicated.” One determines this characterization by measuring the degree of audience “overlap” between each pair of outlets within the environment, which is simply the proportion of the population who use both.…”

Social Theory after the Internet

“…Other methods include shared website use for the most frequently visited websites, globally or nationally, using Alexa.com (http:// www.alexa.com/ ) rankings (Barnett and Park 2014;Taneja and Webster 2016).…”

“…This method (using data from comScore) was used by Taneja and Webster (2016). Based on 2 million panellists from more than 170 countries, it is measured once per month, and includes the top 1,000 Web domains and subdomains that together account for 99 per cent of Web user visits.…”