INCREASING OF THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ON THE MEDIA FIELD

19.04.2010

INCREASING OF THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ON THE MEDIA FIELD

Samvel Martirosyan

001 (original) Today the conceptual change of the network media connections is taking place. In recent years the search engines, which, in fact, became dominant in the sphere of the information dissemination, have been the key factor for spreading information. For the owners of the web-sites the main factor of entering the information field was and is the dominance in the search engines on the relevant request. At the same time the tendency is exhibited towards the re-formatting of the information field and shift of the dominance in favour of the social networks.

From search engine to the social recommendations

Search engines deliver a result on a definite demand according to the separately elaborated and permanently refreshed principles of the site authoritativeness, its novelty, content and more than a hundred other principles, a part of which is kept secret (in order to avoid artificial markup on behalf of the web-sites owners) and is varied depending on the search engine.

The availability of the huge amount of the information delivered brings to the fact that search engines show the end user only the most relevant results. Thus, Google delivers only first thousand results, ignoring the rest. At the same time, according to the statistics, most of the users turn only to first 10 results of the request (and among them the majority looks only first three results).

The increasing of the media stream and the exponential growth of the online media caused the search engines shift to separate services which deliver the real time automatic matching of the news. Thus, in June 2003, the main Russian language search engine announced their new Яндекс.Новости service. At that time the company announced that the users are delivered quite a new service – the unification of the news close in content in topics and highlighting the main topics of the day. At the same time Яндекс.Новости became multi-media project. There are not only texts, presented on the site, but also photo-, audio-, and video files. “The processing and systematization of the news is going on automatically. Yandex does not produce its own news; it just reflects impartially the informational picture of the day. The algorithms of the analysis and ranking of the data are the original elaboration by Yandex, based on the textual likeness and clustering of the information flows”. (1)

Google released the analogous service Google News in test mode a year earlier, in April 2002, but the final release of the news search was made only in 2006. The similar services were also introduced by other search engines. (Besides, the separate services, which aggregate the news on media grounds, have also appeared). The achievements of the search engines which were breakthrough at that moment, gave the impulse to the development of the online media resources.

At the same time the development of the Internet caused the information market to be ceased by two competitors of the traditional media. On the one hand, the blogs, which have turned into the alterative source of information, are getting more and more popular. The materials have been generated in the blogosphere which can compete with the big mass media in the responsiveness and content. Later on, the integration of the blogosphere with the traditional information grounds began.

But the qualitative changes in the distribution of the media traffic have been caused by the appearance and promotion of the social networks. For the recent five years social networks have shown explosive growth; the number of the active users in the separate social networks meets tens and even hundreds of million; their prevalence is of global character. Many social networks are localized, e.g. Chinese www.51.com, which has more than 100 million registered users, or the Russian language Odnoklassniki.ru (45 million registered users, the traffic is 10 million in 24 hours (2)) or VKontakte.ru (the most active Russian-language social service which has more than 65 million registered users). At the same time the main social networks as for the number of the users, are global and multi-language. Thus, the Facebook – the biggest social network, has gathered more than 450 million registered users for 4 years of its existence and continues its dynamic growth. Among the dynamically growing social networks the Twitter should be mentioned where the content formed by the users is restricted to 140 symbols. The obligatory brevity of the messages and the easiness of their publication (the messages in Twitter can be posted both through the computers and the programmes for the mobile phones or SMS) caused the service to be actively used by traditional media for disseminating its information and to become a mean of civil journalism. Twitter, in fact, substituted traditional media in the period of the cataclysms or social unrest (e.g. during the encounters between opposition and police in Iran, or the earthquake in Haiti and etc.). Today, more than 50 million posts appear in Twitter every day.

Social networks are generating a huge amount of content. Besides, here the conditions are created to spread material, links and multimedia. Unlike search engines in the social networks the clusters of the users who trust to each other are formed; the authoritative users appear. Correspondingly, the recommendations of the definite users become more acceptable for the average user than the results delivered by machines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex. The factor of the increasing information flow is also important. Under such conditions the average user is not able to single out the necessary news sifting out the secondary, even using the modern search engines. Correspondingly, the role of the authoritative users who can work with information by themselves is increasing. Thus, social networks become “recommendation” services, which generate a huge amount of links to the media resources. E.g. according to Yandex the 8% of all the records in Russian segment of Twitter are the links to the mass media (3). Today the social networks are turning into the dominating “recommendation” services to which the search giants cede. Thus, since the middle of 2009 the traffic only from Facebook social network to the sites of the broadcasting companies exceeded the traffic from Google News service (Table 1). At the end of 2009 the number of Facebook users surpassed the number of Yahoo.com visitors (Table 2). In March 2010 Facebook outrun Google as for the share of visitors (Table 3). In general the traffic from Facebook to the biggest sites exceeds, sometimes rather essentially, the similar rates from Google (Table 4).

Thus, the influence of the mass media in the Internet is directly connected not only with their position in the search engines but also in the social networks. Correspondingly, the format of the media materials is being changed too. Thus, the specificity of the social networks implies giving greater consideration to the titles, headlines of the materials.

Armenia and social networks

As for Armenia, here the social networks become a key factor of communication both in Armenia and in the context of Armenia-Diaspora communication. Thus, Armenian network mass media, in fact, have rather restricted audience. The main mass media have 2-3 thousand visitors a day on average. At the same time social networks are the main points of entering Internet for the Armenian user. For example, Odnoklassniki.ru has more than 200 thousand users from Armenia which is comparable to the number of the Internet users in Armenia.

Besides, the Armenian user is actively mastering the English language social networks today – Facebook, Twitter (it should be mentioned that the penetration in this networks is lower than to the Russian language services, such as Odnoklassniki.ru, VKontakte.ru). Even more, there are exclusively Armenian networks being formed, which, however, have still had rather restricted contingent.

So the social networks turn into the main sources of information for the Armenian users as well. At the same time, Armenian online mass media began penetration into the social networks, hoping to increase their own audience essentially. The appearance of the social networks may cause the qualitative changes in the structure of the Armenian segment of Internet and Armenia online media (e.g. it may cause, on the one hand, the growth of the number and, on the other hand, the increase of the gap between separate resources in the aspect of the number of the audience).

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