Mapping an Audience Centric World Wide Web: A Departure From Hyperlink Analysis
This reveals that web structure maps based on usage differ from technical infrastructure, impacting researchers and practitioners in web science and digital culture.
The study compared hyperlink-based and audience-centric network maps of the top 1000 web domains, finding that the hyperlink network is centralized with few core sites, while the audience network is decentralized and clustered by geo-linguistic lines.
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.