In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic device, including digital data storage media (in contrast to analog electronic media) and digital broadcasting. Digital is defined as any data represented by a series of digits, and media refers to methods of broadcasting or communicating this information. Together, digital media refers to mediums of digitized information broadcast through a screen and/or a speaker.[1] This also includes text, audio, video, and graphics that are transmitted over the internet for viewing or listening to on the internet.[2]
Digital media platforms, such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitch, accounted for viewership rates of 27.9 billion hours in 2020.[3] A contributing factor to its part in what is commonly referred to as the digital revolution can be attributed to the use of interconnectivity.[4]
Examples of digital media include software, digital images, digital video, video games, web pages and websites, social media, digital data and databases, digital audio such as MP3, electronic documents and electronic books. Digital media often contrasts with print media, such as printed books, newspapers and magazines, and other traditional or analog media, such as photographic film, audio tapes or video tapes.
Digital media has had a significantly broad and complex impact on society and culture. Combined with the Internet and personal computing, digital media has caused disruptive innovation in publishing, journalism, public relations, entertainment, education, commerce and politics. Digital media has also posed new challenges to copyright and intellectual property laws, fostering an open content movement in which content creators voluntarily give up some or all of their legal rights to their work. The ubiquity of digital media and its effects on society suggest that we are at the start of a new era in industrial history, called the Information Age, perhaps leading to a paperless society in which all media are produced and consumed on computers.[5] However, challenges to a digital transition remain, including outdated copyright laws, censorship, the digital divide, and the spectre of a digital dark age, in which older media becomes inaccessible to new or upgraded information systems.[6] Digital media has a significant, wide-ranging and complex impact on society and culture.[5]
Digital media platforms like YouTube work through a triple-product business model in which platforms provide information and entertainment (infotainment) to the public often at no cost, while simultaneously capturing their attention, and also collecting user data to sell to advertisers.[7] This business model aims to maximize consumer engagement on the platform.
Paid media refers to promotional channels that marketers pay to use, including traditional media (e.g., television, radio, print, or outdoor advertising), online and digital media (e.g., paid search ads, web and social media display ads, mobile ads, or email marketing). This model compels businesses to develop sponsored media then pay social media platforms like Instagram for the right to show such media to customers in the platforms' newsfeeds. These customers become exposed to paid media, sometimes referred to as promoted or sponsored posts.[8]