"Focasting: The Future of Web Advertising."
Recently, the author proposed a framework to evaluate commercial web sites from a customer's perspective of value added and reported the results with 1000 sites from USA and Canada. It this project, the same approach is applied to a comparative study of commercial web sites from Australia, France, Hong Kong, and USA. Samples from 20 industries are evaluated to give a global profile of business on the web in mid-1996.
The Industries
Commercial web sites were selected from each of the following 20 industries:
Advertising Aviation Apparel/Fashion Banking Computers Construction Healthcare Hotel/Resorts Insurance Internet Services Jewelry Manufacturing Movie/TV/Radio News/Magazines Publishing Real Estate Software Sports Travel Wine/Beverage
Summary of Results
In order to shed some light on the relative development of commercial web sites by industry and by locality, we use a crude measure of the "breadth" in their value-adding features. For the 20 industries, the averages for this measure are 3.32, 2.51, 2.40, and 1.92 for USA, Australia, France, and Hong Kong, respectively. As a snapshot of how businesses are making use of WWW technology on the Internet as of mid-1996, the results are revealing. Although the US is ahead in most categories, the patterns across all localities are quite consistent. These and other details are discussed in a full report.
A full report on these results, as well as global comparative studies covering Australia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan now appears as an article entitled "Evaluating the World Wide Web: A Global Study of Commercial Sites" in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 1997, and available at http://www.ascusc.o rg/jcmc/vol3/issue1/ho.html.
"Focasting: The Future of Web Advertising."
"A Pilot Study of Internet User Attitudes toward
Focused Broadcasting on the World Wide Web."