A Study on the Hyperlink Structures of the Official Websites of TV Networks: Analysis Focus on ABC, BBC, NHK, and KBS

Abstract

This paper explores the hyperlink structures of the official websites for the following terrestrial TV networks: ABC(US), BBC(UK), NHK(Japan), and KBS(Korea). These websites were selected and visualized to analyze the hyperlink structure and examine the connection relations among the TV networks. A total of 4378 data was collected through the Voson site and were analyzed with NodeXL. Results shows that NHK’s network demonstrates a good network structure at a quite high level, holding more related websites than BBC. We discovered that ABC TV network has the largest effect with the largest number of out-links. Surprisingly, structures of BBC and NHK were quite similar, overcoming geographical and cultural differences. Thus, both TV networks were seen to be progressive and open. On the contrary, ABC and KBS were considered to be relatively conservative. A comprehensive review of the category points combination chart revealed that NHK''s official website has the widest variety of hyperlinks. The shortest distance of a hyperlink between a website type and a TV network meant that the TV network has a larger number of links to those website types than other TV networks do. The result may provide Internet users to efficiently select TV network web pages according to the types of information they want to find out.