Ecological constraints on audience size in the digital media system: evidence from the longitudinal tracking data from 2019 to 2022.

This article investigates the ecological factors influencing audience size among 64 digital media platforms categorized as news, communication, and social species, using Comscore's longitudinal audience data from 2019 to 2022. It finds that a platform's audience size is negatively affected by niche overlap—defined as the proportion of its users who also use another platform—indicating competitive pressure, with this effect moderated by the platform's prior audience size (size dependence) and species membership (species dependence). The study also demonstrates short-term audience inertia, where past audience size strongly predicts current size, and identifies distinct long-term audience growth trends across platform species, reflecting the digital media ecosystem's adaptive resilience. These findings highlight asymmetric competitive dynamics among platform types and suggest that audience overlap generally constrains rather than benefits platform growth in the digital media environment.