Incentives for Quality over Time – The Case of Facebook Applications

We study the market for applications on Facebook, the dominant platform for social networking and make use of a rule change by Facebook by which high-quality applications were rewarded with further opportunities to engage users. We find that the change led to quality being a more important driver of usage while sheer network size became less important. Further, we find that update frequency helps applications maintain higher usage, while generally usage of Facebook applications declines less rapidly with age

Strategic Analysis of How to Maximize the Earning Potential of Widgets

This paper presents an analysis and recommendations for maximizing the earning potential of CBC widgets. Theoretical concepts, such as the Customer Value Model, Roger\u27s Model of Adoption and viral marketing are used to identify ways to grow widget adoption and encourage viral distribution as a means to increase impressions available for sale to advertisers. The paper explores trends in Internet usage and advertising, with a focus on defining best practices that can be applied broadly to all widgets

Towards Profit Maximization for Online Social Network Providers

Online Social Networks (OSNs) attract billions of users to share information and communicate where viral marketing has emerged as a new way to promote the sales of products. An OSN provider is often hired by an advertiser to conduct viral marketing campaigns. The OSN provider generates revenue from the commission paid by the advertiser which is determined by the spread of its product information. Meanwhile, to propagate influence, the activities performed by users such as viewing video ads normally induce diffusion cost to the OSN provider. In this paper, we aim to find a seed set to optimize a new profit metric that combines the benefit of influence spread with the cost of influence propagation for the OSN provider. Under many diffusion models, our profit metric is the difference between two submodular functions which is challenging to optimize as it is neither submodular nor monotone. We design a general two-phase framework to select seeds for profit maximization and develop several bounds to measure the quality of the seed set constructed. Experimental results with real OSN datasets show that our approach can achieve high approximation guarantees and significantly outperform the baseline algorithms, including state-of-the-art influence maximization algorithms.Comment: INFOCOM 2018 (Full version), 12 page

Advertising-based revenue model in digital media market

In the case of advertising-based revenue model, a company creates a digital media product, attracts interaction and engagement of users and then sells access to this audience to advertisers. This revenue model allows users to receive useful content for free or at a low price, while publishers accelerate the growth and adoption of their digital product. Although overreliance on advertising may result in failure to develop the core product, the advertising-based revenue model has become one of the most popular sources of revenue for many web products. Existing empirical studies on digital media revenue models are conducted from singular viewpoints, focusing on new types of revenue models and lacking the comprehensive research of possibilities of advertising-based revenue model in the modern digital media market. In this study, the focus is on the real case of creating the content website and making it profitable in six months using the pure advertising-based revenue model. It is empirically proven that, in order to stay competitive, a new digital media product should aim at decreasing website costs, increasing revenue and scaling up the product to reach a wider audience. Minimum marketing costs can be achieved through working on the relevance and quality of advertising, reasonable targeting and landing page experience. As for increasing advertising revenue, the main point is constantly experimenting with advertising format optimization, adding new advertising networks and enhancing landing page quality. It is empirically proven that the pure advertising-based revenue model can be profitable for a new digital media product entering a highly competitive market. However, high gross margins can be achieved only by attracting quality target audience, achieving economies of scale and diversifying the revenue model

The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok

TikTok is the international twin of China’s mobile short video app, Douyin, and one of the fastest growing short video platforms in the world. Owned by Chinese tech giant, ByteDance, TikTok and Douyin share many similarities in terms of appearance, functionality, and platform affordances; however, they exist in radically different markets and are governed by radically different forces. Unlike other popular mobile media platforms in China and internationally, TikTok and Douyin are neither part of the big three tech giants in China nor the big five in the US. This provides an interesting case study to investigate how an emerging internet company adapts its products to better fit divergent expectations, cultures, and policy frameworks in China and abroad. Using the app walkthrough method informed by platformization of culture production theory, this study highlights the similarities and distinctions between these two platforms. We argue the co-evolution of Douyin and TikTok is a new paradigm of global platform expansion that differs from strategies of regionalization adopted by previous major social media platforms. We contribute to platformization theory by developing the concept of parallel platformization to explain ByteDance’s strategies for surviving in two opposing platform ecosystems in China and abroad

Selling the Artist, Not the Art: Using Personal Brand Concepts To Reform Copyright Law for the Social Media Age

This Note will argue that American courts should take account of digital works’ secondary purpose as personal brand advertisement and treat these works as such, thereby protecting creators’ economic interests in a world where social capital is economic capital. In Part I, I explain how Internet creators, ordinary users, companies, and social media influencers operate under the current system of formal copyright law and informal norms. What they appear to want out of an attendant legal regime looks more like personal brand protection, specifically insofar as it encompasses the attribution right and the ability to monetize their whole oeuvre rather than specific content. In Part II, I discuss privately ordered methods of enforcing the rights that creators seem to want, before explaining that these methods are insufficient to meet creators’ needs. Finally, in Part III, inspired by recent judicial developments that offer promising interpretations of the Copyright Act, I outline a path to more robust protection of attribution and integrity rights than copyright law has previously afforded

Business Models of Journalistic Startups in Portugal: an Analysis of Product Innovation, Dissemination and Monetization in Media Enterprises

Purpose: Journalistic startups are thriving around the world, bringing new approaches to the news media environment in terms of concepts, contents, dissemination, internal organization, and business models. This research is relevant to create a prospective view on the evolution of the news media business in the next years, also allowing us to identify some trends and experiences which can be useful to future researchers work, and for professionals of news media companies, startups or not, to get some insights that might help to develop (or even save) their own businesses. Methodology: Through semi-structured interviews with the editorial managers of each of the research subjects, we tried to understand the genesis, concepts, processes, and goals of these startups. We made a thematic analysis of the content, using an adapted version of the IPTC NewsCodes, to understand the editorial approach in terms of Genre, Subject, Media Topic, Media, and Priority in each of the startup’s publication platform. To better understand the business, we did a business model mapping, using the Business Model Canvas conceptual tool, for all the subjects. Findings/Contribution: The main findings indicate that all the startups in this research started through the identification of a problem or a need, within a small group of friends or colleagues. They all try to fit into a niche and not compete with legacy media, and search for alternative financing sources. All the teams are small, produce mainly long form reporting and interviews, and use mostly written text - but video tends to grow in volume. All the subjects work for niche audiences, by location or interests. These results contribute to create a structured and broader view of the journalistic startups scene in Portugal, but can also help other researchers to apply similar methods to map different realities, in geographical or thematical terms. This research can also contribute to better understanding the challenges that digital news media face in this networked society we live in

The Small-er Screen: YouTube Vlogging and the Unequipped Child Entertainment Labor Laws

Family vloggers are among the millions of content creators on YouTube. In general, vloggers frequently upload recorded videos of their daily lives. Family vloggers are unique because they focus their content around their familial relationships and the lives of their children. One set of family vloggers, the Ace Family, has recorded their children’s lives from the day they were born and continue to upload videos of each milestone, including “Elle Cries on Her First Rollercoaster Ride” and “Elle and Alaïa Get Caught Doing What!! **Hidden Camera**.” Another vlogging couple, Cole and Savannah LaBrant, post similar content, including videos titled “Baby Posie’s Health Emergency” and “Everleigh Doesn’t Want a Baby Sister.” Family channels often involve pranks and reactions, most of which are centered around young children. Given their high amounts of views and subscribers, channels like these are monetized by YouTube and granted various brand sponsorships. What looks like studio-quality home videos have actually become part of a booming business, and child labor laws have failed to protect children who have essentially become employees of the Internet. Children on YouTube and social media are not treated the same way as, for example, child actors on a movie set are. Parents are free to involve their children in content in whatever way they desire—as long as they do not violate YouTube community guidelines—without worrying about time regulations, filming conditions, licensing requirements, or setting up funds for their children’s work. The general concern about children’s safety on the Internet has been especially relevant since the growth of the platform TikTok. Potentially “more than a third of [TikTok’s] 49 million daily users . . . in the United States [are] 14 years old or younger.” In fact, TikTok’s most followed creator, Charli D’Amelio, is a minor. Although the concern for the safety of younger users on TikTok may be different than the concern for children on YouTube given parental involvement in YouTube content creation, the rapid growth and accessibility of TikTok is an example of the ever-growing and evolving social media culture in the United States and around the world. TikTok utilizes a recommendation style algorithm known as the “For You” page that personalizes a feed of videos for its users. Although the exact algorithm may be somewhat of a mystery, it suggests that the platform itself has some control over which videos users are exposed to based on that user’s activity. TikTok has also become another social media platform where users can monetize their content and include brand sponsorships similar to those found on YouTube and Instagram. In 2020, TikTok began planning a $200 million fund to support its creators. Unlike many YouTube videos, “TikToks” are a minute or less in duration, making them much more user-friendly for beginners and easier to make and upload. As such, parents uploading videos of their children is also common practice on TikTok, just as it is on YouTube or Instagram. Some parents have even created accounts that consist almost entirely of videos of their babies. Although TikTok’s history as a platform is much shorter than YouTube’s, it serves as a good example of the direction social media is heading toward: content that is becoming easier to upload and watch. User-generated content on various social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is now a prevalent form of modern entertainment, and it involves child participants much like the use of child actors in television and film. Child labor laws fail to keep pace with the rapidly evolving Internet entertainment ecosystem, and this issue requires specific action by the legislature and corporations behind popular social media platforms. This Comment covers child entertainment labor laws in the United States and some of the legislative history behind child labor laws to demonstrate the need for expanded and newly adopted legislation to accommodate the new world of user-generated content. It discusses the nature of family vlogging and how it compares to traditional entertainment media and argues for a multitude of legislative changes to better protect children’s interests when they are featured in social media posts for monetary gain, including: the application of federal child labor laws to family vlogging and social media influencing, the adoption of child entertainment labor laws in individual states, an expansion of the pre-existing provisions to include entertainment on social media platforms, and the adaptation of YouTube community guidelines to better safeguard the interests of children who appear on family vlog channels

Startup dilemmas - Strategic problems of early-stage platforms on the internet

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