The Evolving Audience Network during Media Environment Transition – A Longitudinal Study of Cross-Platform Use in China

ABSTRACT

Scholars disagree on whether the media environment has become more concentrated, fragmented, polarized or overlapped. By pooling data from a total of 250 audience surveys conducted over 9 years, we investigated the evolution of a cross-platform audience network during a time of transition in the media environment. We found that both the fragmentation and duplication of the media system changed in a curvilinear manner. More importantly, this study showed that the center of the cross-platform network was transferred from offline to online. This study emphasizes the dynamic of media choice at various stages of media technology development.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Note that the surveys were not consecutive. From time to time, the surveys stopped or were conducted with other purposes. Thus, there were 250 surveys in nearly 9 years. In addition, there were some inconsistencies in terms of the questions on different questionnaires. For example, the question asking about newspaper readership was a multiresponse question before 2011, but the question was modified to a single-response question in 2011, and then changed back to a multiresponse question in 2012. In addition, the number of alternative media for selection on the lists differed from time to time. However, given these constraints, the media lists included in the datasets were common options in various surveys.

² The LA-RDD sampling frame was created by using four-digit prefixes that contained district numbers from the white pages telephone directory. All possible suffixes were then added to create a list of possible telephone numbers.

³ Note that the series of months was not continuous, because the surveys were not conducted every month during the study period. However, this method did not affect the analysis, as only the trend of the series was considered, instead of specific time points.

⁴ As Gini coefficients and average weighted degrees were measured on different scales, they were transformed into Z scores before plotting.

⁵ The Internet industry was significantly impacted by the financial crisis of 2008, as consumption of media and information decreased and investment in online advertising also fell. Owing to a lack of capital investment, a number of online content providers closed, and the number of websites fell from 3,231,838 in 2009 to 1,908,000 in 2010 (Gu, 2008; Cui & Zhou, 2011). After the financial crisis, the number of websites grew again from 2,300,000 in 2011 and 4,229,000 in 2015 (Cui & Shao, 2016). These websites also benefited from the substantial increment of new users in China (Cui & He, 2012).

⁶ This is the Twitter-like social media, which has the largest number of users in China.

⁷ This is an instant messaging mobile application developed by Tencent in China. It had as many as one billion daily active users in 2018, according to a report from Tencent.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant 18CXW029; Foundation for Distinguished Research Groupsin Higher Education of Guangdong under Grant 2018WCXTD015.

Notes on contributors

Pianpian Wang

Pianpian Wang (PhD, City University of Hong Kong) is an assistant professor of communication at Shenzhen University. Her research interests focus on online public opinion and computational communication.

Xiaohua Wang

Xiaohua Wang (PhD, Wuhan University) is a professor of communication at Shenzhen University. Her research interests focus on media effects.