TY - JOUR
T1 - Understanding Chinese online users and their visits to websites
T2 - Application of Zipf's law
AU - Jiang, Qiqi
AU - Tan, Chuan Hoo
AU - Phang, Chee Wei
AU - Sutanto, Juliana
AU - Wei, Kwok Kee
N1 - Funding Information:
The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Strategic Research Grant Scheme sponsored by City University of Hong Kong, China (Project No. CityU 7002900 ).
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Competition for consumers to visit company websites has intensified in recent years. An important indicator of website popularity (and consequent survival) is the extent to which the website can draw consumer visits vis-à-vis other websites. A majority of the current understanding on consumer visits is limited to a single website, and leaves little knowledge on the performance of one website compared with others. In tracking the Internet usage behavior of 200 individuals in Mainland China for 30 consecutive days, we applied Zipf's law to identify the divergence points separating popular websites from non-popular ones. Two measurements were used, namely, visit traffic (number) and visit engagement (time spent). We observed that 94.87% of the entire visit traffic is devoted to 15.08% of all visited websites, whereas 84.63% of engagements are on the top 6.16% visited websites. These findings suggest that few websites accounted for the bulk of online traffic and time. Further, we segmented the dataset based on two key proxy variables of user demographics, which are gender and occupation. The findings on visit traffic remained salient after considering user segments, but the findings on website engagement varied across different user segments. Our further analysis, which categorized the visited websites by their main service, revealed the type of Internet users attracted to popular websites.
AB - Competition for consumers to visit company websites has intensified in recent years. An important indicator of website popularity (and consequent survival) is the extent to which the website can draw consumer visits vis-à-vis other websites. A majority of the current understanding on consumer visits is limited to a single website, and leaves little knowledge on the performance of one website compared with others. In tracking the Internet usage behavior of 200 individuals in Mainland China for 30 consecutive days, we applied Zipf's law to identify the divergence points separating popular websites from non-popular ones. Two measurements were used, namely, visit traffic (number) and visit engagement (time spent). We observed that 94.87% of the entire visit traffic is devoted to 15.08% of all visited websites, whereas 84.63% of engagements are on the top 6.16% visited websites. These findings suggest that few websites accounted for the bulk of online traffic and time. Further, we segmented the dataset based on two key proxy variables of user demographics, which are gender and occupation. The findings on visit traffic remained salient after considering user segments, but the findings on website engagement varied across different user segments. Our further analysis, which categorized the visited websites by their main service, revealed the type of Internet users attracted to popular websites.
KW - Chinese Internet market
KW - Internet usage pattern
KW - User demographics
KW - Zipf's law
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84879385891&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2013.05.006
DO - 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2013.05.006
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84879385891
SN - 0268-4012
VL - 33
SP - 752
EP - 763
JO - International Journal of Information Management
JF - International Journal of Information Management
IS - 5
ER -