The Internet audience: Web use as mass behavior

Abstract

We conceive of the Internet as a medium of mass communication, and we analyze 2 behavioral features of its audience: size and duplication. Internet audiences are highly concentrated in the most popular Web sites, conforming to Pareto`s Law. Duplication across pairs of Web sites is explained by the size of the audiences unique to each site in the pair, conforming to Goodhardt`s duplication of viewing law. In addition, similarities of content or domain modestly increase duplication across Web sites. A 4-variable model explains over 80% of the variance in duplication.