The role of media‐embedded heuristics in achieving online readership popularity

Readership popularity has been an important proxy for success for many emerging online interactive media sites. Given the exponential growth of new web applications and services, and the intense competition among them, attaining and retaining popularity are difficult. One possible approach to this problem is to enhance the competitiveness of a web presence by using appropriate web design mechanisms. Research in this area has mainly focused on technological issues and usability studies. Few studies have paid attention to the socially constructed meaning (cognition) that is embedded in the context of media. Drawing on the heuristic model from the social cognition perspective, the author posits that source credibility and content freshness are two important media‐embedded heuristics potentially influential to the readership popularity of online interactive media sites. The content analysis results of 100 leading weblogs strongly supported this hypotheses. Key quantitative findings were also consistent with the qualitative evidence provided by 28 expert practitioners. This study expands our understanding of the related constructs from a social cognition perspective and calls for design attention to influential media‐embedded traits when developing online interactive media and related websites.

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