Mapping an Audience Centric World Wide Web: A Departure From Hyperlink Analysis

TL;DR

This paper compares hyperlink-based and audience-centric network maps of popular websites, revealing that audience behavior creates a more decentralized and culturally clustered web structure than hyperlink analysis suggests.

Contribution

It introduces an audience-centric approach to mapping the web, highlighting cultural and usage-based differences from traditional hyperlink-based maps.

Findings

Audience network is more decentralized than hyperlink network.

Web structure aligns more with geo-linguistic factors.

Hyperlink maps show centralized core websites.

Abstract

This paper argues that maps of the Web's structure based solely on technical infrastructure such as hyperlinks may bear little resemblance to maps based on Web usage, as cultural factors drive the latter to a larger extent. To test this thesis, the study constructs two network maps of 1000 globally most popular Web Domains, one based on hyperlinks and the other using an "audience centric" approach with ties based on shared audience traffic between these domains. Analyses of the two networks reveal that unlike the centralized structure of the hyperlinks network with few dominant "core" websites, the audience network is more decentralized and clustered to a larger extent along geo-linguistic lines.