RESEARCH FINDINGS
As Antonio García Jiménez, María Cruz López de Ayala Lopez, and Carmen Gaona Pisionero point out in their article, A Vision of Uses and Gratifications applied to the study of Internet use by Adolescents, “With a psychological basis and a marked individual inclination, the Theory of Uses and Gratifications has a clear guiding principle: different people can use the media for different objectives. Therefore, the choice and the use of media has a specific intention and arises from both personal and social motivations.” (Jiménez, Cruz López de Ayala Lopez, & Gaona Pisionero, 2012). This further proves the point that people, in this case adolescents, use websites that allude to their personal tastes. However, it is not at all far fetched to assume that this theory applies to any human being. A businessperson will use a website like LinkedIn.com because one of their main objectives is to expand their company. Likewise, a teenager looking to find new music or find out what is currently popular would most likely seek out a website or mobile application such as Turntable.fm.

When analyzing these media texts, semiology was integral in providing information regarding how the individual aspects of each webpage worked in relation to its surroundings. The avatars on Turntable.fm’s website are an excellent example of this. In regards to advertising, social semiotics were also quite applicable and useful for this analysis, especially in the realm of the language used by said advertisements when put in conversation with the images as a whole. One example pertaining to magazine advertisements (which of course follow many of the same formulas as internet ads) can be found in an article by Kuldip Kaur, Arumugam Nalini, and Yunus Norimah Mohamed. They state that, “The advertisements promote an idealised lifestyle and manipulate readers to a certain extent into believing whatever that is advertised is indeed true. This study revealed how the ideology of beauty is constructed and reconstructed through magazines by stereotyping how beauty products are synonymous with a better life. Advertising language is used to control people's minds. Thus people in power (advertisers) use language as a means to exercise control over others.” (Kaur, Nalini, & Mohamed, 2013) This shows that the way that advertisers use language and images to change how people think about certain products and websites.

Discourse analysis was, again, exceptionally helpful in understanding why all of these similar yet different startups’ homepages were more or less effective. Strongly supporting the thesis statement of this analysis, Belinda De Frutos Torres, María Sánchez Valley, and Tamara Vázquez Barrio found in their article Empirical Analysis of Values on Interactive Advertisement Aimed at a Teenage Audience, that, “Campaigns aimed at youth have a significant presence of transgression, adventure, materialism, power, competitiveness and personal success values, while campaigns aimed at both targets (adults and youth simultaneously) have a significant presence of normative values.” (Torres, Valley, & Barrio, 2012) Through close examination of a variety of startup homepages, focusing on their fonts, signs, images, language, and aesthetic ‘feels’ as a whole, it is obvious that they are quite aware of exactly who they are attempting to sell their product to, and are doing it quite effectively.

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