Do corporate websites’ changes reflect firms’ survival?

Published date08 October 2018
Pages956-970
Date08 October 2018
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2016-0321
AuthorDesamparados Blazquez,Josep Domenech,Ana Debón
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management
Do corporate websiteschanges
reflect firmssurvival?
Desamparados Blazquez and Josep Domenech
Department of Economics and Social Sciences,
Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain, and
Ana Debón
Department of Applied Statistics and Operational Research, and Quality,
Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent changes in corporate websites reflect firms
survival. Since keeping a website online involves some costs, it is likely that firms would invest resources on it
only when they are active and healthy. Therefore, when a firm dies, this event is likely to be manifested on its
website as lacking updates or being down.
Design/methodology/approach Changes in the corporate websites of a panel of Spanish firms were
tracked between 2008 and 2014 in order to evaluate the approach. The status of websites, classified according
to the type of change undergone, was used to infer firmsactivity status (active or inactive). Multi-period
logistic regressions and a duration model were applied to study the relationship among the website status and
the firms status.
Findings Resultsshowed that changes in website contentsclearly reflect the firms status.Active firms were
mainly associated with updated corporate websites, while inactive firms were more associated with down
websites. In fact, resultsconfirmed that the firmsdeath hazard increases when the website activity lowers.
Originality/value Although onlineinformation is increasingly beingused to monitor the economy, this is
the first studyto connect online data to firmssurvival.The results revealed a new sourceof information about
business demography and evidenced corporate websites as a fresh source of high granularitybusiness data.
Keywords Corporate websites, Business demography statistics, Firmssurvival, Online economic information
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Business demography is one of the economic aspects that attracts more attention from
governments and policy makers. Indeed most official statistics institutions (e.g. Eurostat,
Office for National Statistics of Spain and Australian Bureau of Statistics) carry out detailed
surveys to monitor the active population of firms, their birth, survival and death. The
interest shown in business demography statistics relies on the important role they play in
economic growth, productivity and employment (Eurostat and OECD, 2007).
In the digital era, the prominent role of the internet in economy and society, along with
the development of advanced computer systems and architectures, opens up new ways of
monitoring economic activities (Blazquez and Domenech, 2014; Vaughan, 2014) and,
therefore, business demography. The internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have
become basic tools for the daily activities of individuals and companies, whose importance
is increasing in both developed and developing countries. For consumers, the WWW is a
convenient instrument to find information on products and services, and if available, to
purchase them online. For companies, the WWW is an inexpensive channel to not only offer
information about their products, services and activities, but to also make transactions with
customers more quickly and more flexibly. In this context, companies have massively
Online Information Review
Vol. 42 No. 6, 2018
pp. 956-970
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-11-2016-0321
Received 10 November 2016
Revised 7 April 2017
4 May 2017
Accepted 13 November 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
with Grants TIN2013-43913-R and MTM2013-45381-P-AR, and by the Spanish Ministry of Education
with Grant FPU14/02386. The authors thank the participants of the 1st International Conference on
Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA2016)for their invaluable comments.
956
OIR
42,6

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