Online news media sites are presently the primary sources of news for a large number of users world-wide. The content published by media sites have high temporal churn as they tend to focus on recommending recent / breaking news. Analyzing data from a popular online mass media site nytimes.com as well as a popular online social media site twitter.com, we show that the resulting churn in popular...

This exploratory study investigates social network sites (SNS) users’ time allocation behavior among various traditional and new media. Specifically, it examines the difference in degree of dependency on SNS between the young generation and the general population as a new form of news medium based on the media system dependency (MSD) and the microeconomic consumption (MEC) theories. The researc...

Social media has become a value-adding marketing channel. With the significance of social media for online small businesses and the lack of understanding of this area, this study attempts to investigate the impact of social media marketing on the sales performance of such businesses. Drawing on the theories of media richness and uses and gratifications, we propose a research model in which the ...

Online social media has become an integral part of our social lives. Online social interactions are distinct from face-to-face interactions. Different social media types have enabled novel forms of social exchanges to take place. Individuals vary greatly in their online behaviors and preferences. The current research argued for the significance of understanding individual differences in social ...

The Internet and social media have become increasingly important for children today, as they seek information, friends, and social support online. Social media is also home for communities that may advocate unhealthy behavior. Proanorexia (proana) and probulimia sites and online communities are publicly available; they are interactive and promote “thinspiration” (“inspirational” pictures of ext...

Online social media such as Twitter are widely used for mining public opinions and sentiments on various issues and topics. The sheer volume of the data generated and the eager adoption by the online-savvy public are helping to raise the profile of online media as a convenient source of news and public opinions on social and political issues as well. Due to the uncontrollable biases in the popu...

Social media includes many different forms of technology including online forums, blogs, microblogs (i.e. Twitter), wikipedias, video blogs, social networks and podcasting. The use of social media has grown exponentially and time spent on social media sites now represents one in five minutes spent online. Concomitant with this online growth, there has been an inverse trajectory in direct face-t...

Online media use has become an increasingly important behavioral domain over the past decade. However, studies into the etiology of individual differences in media use have focused primarily on pathological use. Here, for the first time, we test the genetic influences on online media use in a UK representative sample of 16 year old twins, who were assessed on time spent on educational (N = 2,58...