Online audience from the perspective of national scholars: An overview of published articles

Abstract

: The paper examines the way audience phenomenon has been studied by national scholars with the primary goal of identifying researched topics. The content analysis has included scientific papers from the Cobiss database published during the period from 2004 until now. In the body of 34 selected articles, the findings have revealed seven different themes that are not thoroughly examined but rather just opened up. The research topics are: characteristics of the online audience, citizen journalism, traditional media transformation, online user comments, communicators’ perception of online audiences, fandom, and the structure of web spaces. The analysis has revealed the lack of empirical research and concluded that the mentioned topics are dealing with only a small segment of diverse experiences of online audiences.