Make it Interactive and They Will Come: Correlating Interactivity in Antidrug Websites With Site Traffic

• In Event: CAT Interactive Papers #2

Abstract

As preventive health campaigns move to the Internet for attracting larger and younger audiences, it is important to understand the contributions made by the affordances of online media. Interactivity is often touted as an important characteristic, but we do not know if it contributes to greater usage of online health campaigns. To address this issue, we content-analyzed 94 anti-drug websites in the US, in order to assess the extent to which they feature three dominant types of interactivity. This data was compared with website traffic data from Alexa.com. We discovered that the number of interactive gadgets and the total frequency of the three types of interactivity significantly predicted global ranking of the website as well as the number of daily page-views per visitor. The frequency of modality interactivity and the presence of source interactivity on the homepage were particularly useful in predicting website ranking. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Authors

• Jeeyun Oh, Robert Morris University

• S. Shyam Sundar, Pennsylvania State U and Sungkyunkwan Univ