Engl. transl.: Digital Communication And Children: A Content Analysis Of Advertisements On The Websites For Children In Turkey

Rapid development of new communication technologies in 20th century and thus changing social life in numerous fields most notably by methods of establishing communication and providing information, especially in the last quarter of this century, effect children as well, youngest members of society. It is inevitable for children to be exposed to advertisements during their digital experience since websites that aim to reach children as target group may become an important advertising media for advertisers. Accordingly, these digital media’ contents might require regulations. Studies on the fields of communication and psychology show that children are defenseless against advertisements. Visuals, videos, games and other digital contents which are accessible to children may be supervised by their parents but it is very difficult to supervise changeable contents such as pop-ups, banners and videos with interactive advertisements. The aim of this study is to determine risks of uncontrollable digital advertisements in media posed on the children. In order to determine the structural properties of the advertisements on websites for children in Turkey, content analysis of these sites were done in this study. In order to set a content analysis, first a structural criterion was identified and then websites -chosen via these criteria- were analyzed in detail. It was found that the age level was not taken into consideration when contents of advertisements were produced.

According to the results obtained when the content analysis of the websites was made, it was determined that there were advertisements in 20 of 27 sites. Looking at the statistical data of children's websites in Turkey, there are 727,765 daily visitors and 3,302,496 page views in total. According to the statistical findings, it can be said that an average of 700 thousand children are faced with approximately 3 million advertisements every day. It has been determined that there are different advertisements on children's websites that cannot be considered independent of the content of the website. While there are advertisements for children in all of the sites that contain advertisements on the websites examined, 90% of them contain adult-oriented content that children do not constitute the target audience. In addition, it is seen that some advertisements that look like game advertisements for children belong to games for 12+, 16+, 18+ age groups, and also contain images of violence and sexual content. (Güler İplikçi & Batu, 2018, pp.249-251)