An Investigation of Web Presence and Business Intelligence of Australian Game Development Companies Using Webometrics Indicators

Siu Man LUI, School of Maths, Physics and Information Technology, James Cook University, Cairns, Email: Carrie.Lui@jcu.edu.au

Calvin Chun YU, Department of Information Systems and Management, Business School, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Email: calvinyu@ust.hk

Keywords

Web Presence, Business Intelligence, Game developer, Webometrics, Search Engine.

Abstract

Web presence is an important intangible asset, especially for the innovative or creative industry. In order to investigate the web presence of Australian game development companies, a list of 80 Australian game development companies' websites was compiled. We developed an automated tool to execute the advanced search functions of the commercial search engine to obtain webometrics indicators for each website in the list. We collected webometrics indicators such as age, size (number of pages), visibility (number of external in-links) and hubness (number of external out-links). Evolution of the size of the companies' websites over the past 10 years was examined for studying the trend of web presence of the game development companies. The countries and languages of the web pages in-linked to and out-linked from the companies' websites were used to discover the international linkages and exposures of the companies. This study demonstrated a cost-effective method for discovering and monitoring business intelligence and trends of an industry using the Internet.