TRAPS ON THE WEB

Abstract

This paper sheds light on the empirical factors that influence the online competition for an audience. Statistical analyses are used to show that the number of times Websites appear mentioned in traditional news media has a positive and significant impact on the number of users that access those sites. The level of economic resources managed by the organizations publishing the sites also has a positive impact on the size of audience they get. The analyses reveal that the influence of offline media and economic resources is actually twofold: the more often a site is mentioned in newspapers, and the richer the organization publishing the site is, the more people flock to it, but also the more links the site receives; this improves the site's position in the rankings produced by search engines and reinforces its visibility. The paper provides evidence in support of the critical political economy approach to new media: it shows that the high concentration of online traffic in a few sites is not independent of the resources managed by the organizations producing those sites.

Keywords:

• online visibility
• traffic flow
• political economy of new media

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Rasmus Kleis Nielsen for his comments to a previous version of the paper, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. This work has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, grant number PTA-026-27-1334) and it has benefited from the R+D project SEJ2006-00959/SOCI financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.

Notes

See, for instance, www.google.com/technology for Google's PageRank or www.technorati.com/help/ faq.html#ranking for Technorati's Ranking (accessed on 21 April 2008).

The list was obtained upon request from the Public Interest Registry, the organization managing the domain, in November 2004 and a simple algorithm was used to scan through the list and select randomly 1,000 lines from the document.

This excludes blogs and other participatory platforms published in other domains, like .com. The empirical aim of this paper is to analyse how international organizations build their visibility on the web and who is more likely to get an audience. However, some theoretical conclusions can be generalized from this data that might also apply to those other domains.

See http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=12 (accessed on 21 April 2008).