Abstract

It is widely believed that the spread of data extraction technologies on the Internet has led to the erosion of traditional professional content providers and the transformation of the online media ecosystem. To investigate this shift in media ecology, we conduct relational analyses of actual user behavior, departing from existing research that primarily focuses on business institutions and designs of technology. We assess the prevalence of the data extraction business model by grouping websites along two architectural traits that afford data extraction – user content generation and curation – and analyzing how some website architectures get privileged in the web use ecosystem. Since data extraction is relational, we advocate a network measure to capture shared usage in addition to individual popularity of websites. Our analyses of world’s 850 most popular websites in 2009, 2011, and 2013 reveal that data extraction fostered a two-tier hierarchical web use ecosystem, marked by interdependence between professional content producers and data extractors. Our study thereby shows that the dynamics in play are more complicated than what is captured by explanations centered on either capabilities of platform giants or the decline of traditional journalism and media organizations.

摘要

人们普遍认为，数据提取技术在Internet上的普及已导致传统专业内容提供商的侵蚀和在线媒体生态系统的转型。为了调查媒体生态学的这种转变，我们对实际用户行为进行了相关分析，而与主要针对商业机构和技术设计的现有研究有所不同。我们通过将网站按照提供数据提取的两个体系结构特征（用户内容生成和管理）进行分组，并分析某些网站体系结构如何在Web使用生态系统中享有特权，来评估数据提取业务模型的普遍性。由于数据提取是关系型的，因此我们建议采取一种网络措施来捕获共享的使用情况，以及网站的受欢迎程度。我们对2009年，2011年和2013年全球850个最受欢迎网站的分析表明，数据提取促进了两级分层Web使用生态系统，其标志是专业内容生产者和数据提取者之间的相互依赖。因此，我们的研究表明，与以平台巨头的能力或传统新闻和媒体组织的衰落为中心的解释所捕捉到的情况相比，游戏的动力更为复杂。