A Better Understanding of College Students\u27 YouTube Behaviors

The purpose of this research study is to get a closer look into the behavior of college students towards the video streaming website YouTube. The objective is to understand whether the benefits of publishing videos on the site are positive for business organizations. The study looks at many variables that would help companies better understand what exactly publishing a video on YouTube would do for them. These variables include gender, hours of television watched, hours of Internet used, hours spent reading and whether a video is made by a regular user or a professional company. It was found that males are more likely to use YouTube then females, despite using the Internet much less. It was also shown that there are both pros and cons for implementing user and corporate developed videos

Influencing the Intentions to Visit a Destination: The Case of Potential First-Time and Repeat Visitors

This study presents a model hypothesizing that intention to travel is influenced directly by two major elements of tourism marketing: responses to advertising and the respondent’s use of the official tourism website for a destination. To test the model, data from two Web-based surveys concerning travel to Prince Edward Island (PEI) in 2008 were used: a survey of travel intentions and a follow-up conversion survey. There are four important findings. First, the intention to travel is directly influenced by two major elements of tourism marketing: responses to advertising and the respondent’s use of the official tourism website. Second, actual visitation is influenced directly by travel intentions and indirectly by responses to advertising and potential visitor’s use and reaction to the official website. Third, there is a clear difference in terms of the influences on intentions to visit a destination between potential or actual first-time and repeat visitors. For firsttime visitors, advertising recall was the most powerful predictor of intention to visit PEI; for repeat visitors it was the number of times the respondent visited the website. Fourth, the results of this paper clearly indicate that generating intention to visit leads to actual visits

Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

Word of Mouth, the Importance of Reviews and Ratings in Tourism Marketing

The Internet and social media have given place to what is commonly known as the democratization of content and this phenomenon is changing the way that consumers and companies interact. Business strategies are shifting from influencing consumers directly and induce sales to mediating the influence that Internet users have on each other. A consumer review is “a mixture of fact and opinion, impression and sentiment, found and unfound tidbits, experiences, and even rumor” (Blackshaw & Nazarro, 2006). Consumers' comments are seen as honest and transparent, but it is their subjective perception what shapes the behavior of other potential consumers. With the emergence of the Internet, tourists search for information and reviews of destinations, hotels or services. Several studies have highlighted the great influence of online reputation through reviews and ratings and how it affects purchasing decisions by others (Schuckert, Liu, & Law, 2015). These reviews are seen as unbiased and trustworthy, and considered to reduce uncertainty and perceived risks (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Park & Nicolau, 2015). Before choosing a destination, tourists are likely to spend a significant amount of time searching for information including reviews of other tourists posted on the Internet. The average traveler browses 38 websites prior to purchasing vacation packages (Schaal, 2013), which may include tourism forums, online reviews in booking sites and other generic social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Metrics for Destination Marketing in An Era of Interactive Marketing

Destination marketing has shifted from one-to-many and one-one to completely interactive communication, and therefore requires new metrics which reflect the immersive nature of marketing interactivity. These metrics include traditional quantifiable outcomes such as awareness, brand position, and product purchase but, because of the transformation of destination marketing, must include a range of new metrics which reflect the social structure of the Internet. This paper proposes a number of metrics that destination marketing organizations should use to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts