Paying for Content or Paying for Community? The Effect of Social Involvement on Subscribing to Media Web Sites

Many sites have recently begun to encourage user participation and provide consumers with a virtual community wherein the user can create an on-site identity, make friends, and interact with other consumers. We study the interplay between users’ functional and social behavior on media sites and their willingness to pay for premium services. We use data from Last.fm, a site offering both music consumption and social networking features. The basic use of Last.fm is free and premium services are provided for a fixed subscription fee. While the premium services mainly improve the content consumption experience, we find that willingness to pay for premium services is strongly associated with the level of social activity of the user, and specifically, the community activity of the user. Our results represent new evidence of the importance of introducing community and social activities as drivers for consumers\u27 willingness to pay for online services

WHO PAYS PREMIUM IN THE AGE OF FREE SERVICES? FINDINGS FROM A MEDIA WEBSITE

The challenge for many media websites is converting users from free to fee. In order to encourage user participation and engagement with the websites many of them have provided consumers with a virtual community wherein the user can create an on-site identity, make friends, and interact with other consumers. We study the interplay between users’ functional and social behavior on media sites and their willingness to pay for premium services. We use data from Last.fm, a site offering both music consumption and social networking features. The basic use of Last.fm is free and premium services are provided for a fixed subscription fee. While the premium services mainly improve the content consumption experience, we find that willingness to pay for premium services is strongly associated with the level of social activity of the user, and specifically, the community activity of the user. Our results represent new evidence of the importance of introducing community and social activities as drivers for consumers\u27 willingness to pay for online services

Comparison Sites

Web search technologies are fundamental tools to easily navigate through the huge amount of information available in the Internet. One particular type of search technologies are the so- called shopbots, or comparison sites. The emergence of Internet shopbots and their implications for price competition and market efficiency are the focus of this chapter. We develop a simple model where a price comparison site tries to attract (possibly vertically and horizontally differentiated) online retailers on the one hand, and consumers on the other hand. The analysis of the model reveals that differentiation among the products of the retailers as well as their ability to price discriminate between on- and off-comparison-site consumers play a critical role. When products are homogeneous, if online retailers cannot charge different on- and off-the-comparison- site prices, then the comparison site has incentives to charge fees so high that some firms are excluded, which generates price dispersion and an inefficient outcome. By contrast, when on- and off-comparison-site prices can be different, the comparison site attracts all the players to the platform and the allocation is efficient. A similar result obtains when products are horizontally differentiated. In that case, the comparison site becomes an aggregator of product information and no matter whether firms can price discriminate or not, the comparison site attracts all the players to the platform and an efficient outcome ensues. We argue that the lack of vertical product differentiation may also be critical for this efficiency result. In fact, we show that when quality differences are large, the comparison site may find it profitable to charge fees such that low quality producers are excluded, thereby inducing an inefficient outcome.

Passive, Active, or Co-Active? The Link Between Synchronous User Participation and Willingness to Pay for Premium Options

Social media-enabled business models have transformed the content industry. To increase users’ willingness to pay (WTP), many of today’s content providers have changed from mere content provision towards offering social content experiences. Recent research has confirmed that users’ participation activities, e.g. commenting on content, increase the WTP for social content services’ premium options. So far, social content has been available predominantly on-demand, only allowing asynchronous user participation. Recently, social live content services emerged, which facilitate synchronous user participation and enable so-called co-active behavior. With this study, we conceptualize co-active behavior as the interplay between users while co-experiencing content together, and empirically show that co-active behavior has a stronger effect on WTP for premium options than the classic forms of passive and active behavior. Our work provides theoretical contributions on the WTP for social content as well as implications for the management of social content services

Information is not a Virus, and Other Consequences of Human Cognitive Limits

The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how people allocate their attention to social media content. As a consequence, the position of information in an individual's social feed, as well as explicit social signals about its popularity, determine whether it will be seen, and the likelihood that it will be shared with followers. Accounting for these cognitive limits simplifies mechanics of information diffusion in online social networks and explains puzzling empirical observations: (i) information generally fails to spread in social media and (ii) highly connected people are less likely to re-share information. Studies of information diffusion on different social media platforms reviewed here suggest that the interplay between human cognitive limits and network structure differentiates the spread of information from other social contagions, such as the spread of a virus through a population.Comment: accepted for publication in Future Interne

Media piracy in the Middle East: A case study of 2018 world cup

The main aim of this dissertation is to study the audience\u27s perception, awareness, behavior and attitude towards pirating live sports broadcasting media content in one of the Middle Eastern countries, which is Egypt. Moreover, this research fills a gap in the literature by investigating the media landscape in the Middle East in the age of digitalization, presenting an overview of media piracy, internet penetration and social media usage in the region in general and in Egypt in specific. It also studies the recent piracy activity in the case of 2018 FIFA World Cup in Egypt, by examining the legal and illegal broadcasters in the Middle East. Hence, the core of this study is the Egyptian media audiences and football fans who watched the 2018 tournament either by using legal methods which are subscribing to beIN sports packages, since it was the only legal broadcaster in the region, or using other illegal techniques such as illegal television cables and illegal live streaming from the internet. The study is conducted on a purposive sample of 460 young Egyptians; their age varies between 18-30 based on previous statistics, which revealed that the millennials in MENA are the ones who violate the intellectual property of the media the most and they are altering the media landscape in the region. The research follows a triangulation method by combining two research approaches; in-depth interviews as a qualitative methodology and surveys as a quantitative one. The theoretical framework used in this study is the Theory of Planned Behavior and Social Responsibility Theory. Also, this study revealed several different important factors that are related to pirating sports broadcasting media content, which are: 1) the impact of Egyptian youth on this phenomenon, 2) the factors that influence their intentions and behaviors to violate the intellectual property of the media, 3) the techniques that could be used to reduce piracy, 4) the audience awareness about this issue and the relationship between being a football fan and the size of sports pirated content, and 5) the correlation between the economic status of the audiences and the act of media piracy. Thus, the study at hand managed to outline the behavior of the Egyptian youth towards pirating the media

Repositioning of the brand TV cine & séries online: strategic analysis of the own means of social networks and online platform

This Work Project, conducted within a direct research internship at NOS, aims to propose a reposition of the brand TVCine & Séries online, focusing on a strategic analysis of the own means of social networks and online platforms. Through secondary data provided by NOS and collected online, in-depth interviews of current and past clients of the service and the author’s experience on the matter, recommendations were developed based on blue ocean strategy. On analyzing the most relevant attributes in the Pay TV industry’s strategy canvas, a new value curve is reconstructed for TVC&S. Over the elimination of static website, reduction of offline marketing expenditures to raise SEO design and social content tools usage, a new video on demand service must be created alongside with customer interactivity in the new user friendly website, which provides a flexible subscription fee scheme and a recommendation and customized service. These recommendations try to deliver a more focus, unique and clear message for the industry, enhancing TVC&S’s value innovation

Build Customer Loyalty Using Microblog – A Relationship Perspective

In recent years, micro-blog, a kind of Social Network service (SNS), has been adopted as a popular way for people to interact with their significant others. Nowadays, people can exchange short messages via various digital devices through micro-blogging. Witnessing this trend, practitioners strive hard to seek opportunities in utilizing micro-blogging for better customer reach. Numerous studies have also investigated this phenomenon. While previous studies primarily placed their focus on people’s motivation to use SNS, usage pattern and potential applications in various discipline, to our best knowledge, Research on micro-blog is still in its infancy and the core concept of SNS, i.e. social relationship, is rarely addressed. This study thus proposed a framework to investigate the effect that micro-blog are to exert on consumer’s relationship with firms. Results suggested that system quality, interaction quality, and relationship benefits are influential to relationship quality which contributes to loyalty. Implications of research findings are also to be discussed in this study