How Does Web Advertising Affect Users' Information Seeking, Website Evaluation, and Source

Kim, Youngseek

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/15245 Copy

Description

Title

How Does Web Advertising Affect Users' Information Seeking, Website Evaluation, and Source

Author(s)

Kim, Youngseek

Issue Date

2009-02-08

Keyword(s)

• Information Seeking
• Internet
• Web
• Website
• Advertising
• Advertisement

Abstract

Web advertising (ads) is currently a big issue for information seeking behavior on the Internet. Since websites are an important source of information in our daily lives, the websites have become popular media for advertising. The advertisers think that Web ads are the best way to get people to know quickly many things about a product or service [7]. However, from the viewers’ perspective, Web ads can be considered an obstacle to users’ information seeking on a website. Actually, Web ads received complains as being annoying or intruding, and it is considered to have negative effects such as affecting people’s task performance by many researchers [2, 5, 6]. The objective of this research is to know how Web advertising affects users’ information seeking, website evaluation, and source evaluation. Most previous studies have focused on the effectiveness of Web ads toward viewers. Not many studies researched on how Web ads affect users’ information seeking performance, website evaluation, and content evaluation of a website. According to visual attention theory, since people’s visual attention is limited, the more attention Web ads received from a viewer, the less amount of attention was available for the visual search task and the more damaging it was to the search task [5]. Therefore, Web ads will affect people’s information seeking performance, and consequently it will influence website evaluation and source evaluation of the website. My research question is: how do different types of Web advertising which attract people’s attention at differing levels affect users’ information seeking performance, website evaluation, and source evaluation? I will employ an empirical research design with various levels of attention grabbing Web ads and users’ information seeking performance, website evaluation, and source evaluation. I will use a total of 200 college students as the sample population in this research, and I will randomly assign the participants into four different groups (50 participants in each group): three experimental groups for low, medium, and high attention grabbing Web ads and one control group (a group with no Web ads). There would be no significant difference between groups in terms of years of computer experience, years of Internet experience, and gender.

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/15245

Owning Collections