AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO DETERMINE THE RELATIONSHIP STRENGTH BETWEEN INTERNET MEDIA AND ONLINE READERSHIP

ABSTRACT: Web content in the context of online news is growing at a rapid speed where traditional news reading habits shift in favour of the Internet version. At the same time readership behaviour also changes from print paper readers to more selective online users, who expect news services follow general trends of the online media such as dynamic customised content and personalisation. In an environment where users are often reluctant to fill forms or reveal their preferences in news content, this entails that the online news Web site has to track the behaviour of the reader and serve the reader the content that fits his or her requirements. In this study online readership preferences are observed to produce personalised content, types of news articles that are more relevant to the reader’s preferred categories. The problem is then reduced to determining the strength of the relationship between the reader node and the news category nodes, at which a relationship metric is borrowed from Customer Relationship Management studies