World of Media (Dec 2020)
The German online media market: Online-born information offerings and their audiences – A shift towards digital inequalities?
Abstract
M edia market and media-related inequalities in society have been intensively discussed in academia. Yet it is unclear if the online media market environment reproduces existing inequalities, smoothens them or even creates new ones among media offerings and users, potentially reinforcing a social divide. In this study, we test to which extent inequalities found are truly digital-induced or reproduced from offl ine context using the German Longitudinal IntermediaPlus 2014-2016 dataset and descriptive statistics. Based on an integrative analysis we combine the perspectives of German media offerings (supply side) and media audiences (demand side). We rely on the comparison of the genre portfolios of offl ine-originated and online-born media offerings to evaluate inequalities in the German online media market, based on past research, assuming that offl ine-originated media providers primarily replicate their strategic product portfolio from the offl ine media market to the online media market. Using the media providers’ origin, we identify a typology of offl ine-originated and onlineborn media offerings. For inequalities in media use and potentially resulting social divides we refer to research on the knowledge gap hypothesis and digital divide studies. For 2016, we found German online-born media offerings having a thematically contradictory, entertainment-focused product portfolio that balances existing offl ine-originated inequalities. However, it provokes a ‘silent’ de-polarization, with political offerings almost exclusively offl ine-originated evolving into a niche market on the supply side. On the demand side, we found stronger inequalities in the use of offl ine-originated online media offerings by gender, education and socio-economic status. These mainly mirror the inequalities known from the offl ine context. For age, we found uniquely digital inequalities in online media use.
