Engagement on Digital Platforms: A Theoretical Perspective

The new business models enabled by digital platforms and the ecosystems built around them drive the most profound change in the global macroeconomic environment today. User engagement plays a crucial role in value creation for platform business models. Although Information Systems (IS) literature has started examining this key concept, it presents diverse and inconsistent conceptualizations, resulting in an incomplete nomological network of engagement with important antecedents, consequences, and mechanisms left largely unexamined. This study aims to build a theory of engagement for digital platforms. To achieve this goal, we have provided a coherent definition and a preliminary typology in this extended abstract. We will construct a nomological network of engagement in our follow-up study

What Influences Influencers? Hiding Popularity Signals and Influencer Behavior

The burgeoning popularity of social media has shifted how social media users share and seek information through online platforms. Social media users are often motivated to show the “perfect side” of themselves on the platform, resulting in sharing manipulated appearances and positive aspects of their lives in order to garner more “likes” when comparing their popularity to others. Thus, social media users may often face inauthentic information, which may affect their behaviors on the platform. In this study, we utilize a change in Instagram policy—where they hide the number of likes from the platform— which started in September 2019 in East Asia. Specifically, we examine influencers’ post-generating behavior and post characteristics (e.g., whether it is focused on product vs influencers themselves and the degree of image manipulation). The results show that the number of endorsement postings increases, and influencers are more likely to generate influencer-focused postings after the intervention. In addition, we find that such effects are accentuated when influencers have a the larger follower base. Lastly, our findings suggest that the economic benefit (e.g., total weekly sales) that influencers gain increases after the intervention; however, such an effect is attenuated with influencers having a larger number of followers

Music is Social: From Online Social Features to Online Social Connectedness

Despite the widespread adoption of social networks, the potential value of implementing similar opportunities for social interaction into online content consumption websites has received limited attention. What little research has been done suggests that there is significant potential in implementing social features onto these sites, since increased interaction can lead to higher engagement with the site, and to an increase in users\u27 willingness to pay for the site. Considering that music in an inherently social good, and that consumers desire the opportunity to involve social aspects into their consumption of music, this study develops a new approach to examine the specific types of features that can lead to a feeling of online social connectedness. Results suggest that this distinction is valuable, and the type of features that is most likely to lead to feelings of connectedness is highlighted. Implications for site developers and researchers are also discussed

Dancing to the #challenge: The Effect of TikTok on Closing the Artist Gender Gap

This study examines how an interesting technological phenomenon called the “Hashtag Dance Challenge” (HDC), made popular on the short video platform TikTok, may drive artists’ popularity on the digital music streaming platform, and, importantly, help women, artists, to achieve traction that is needed to succeed commercially. Using data from TikTok, Spotify, and music analytics companies, we analyze the impact of HDCs on artists’ popularity growth rate on Spotify. We find that artists with an HDC-related song achieve a significant daily increase in followership on Spotify, representing traction and appeal within the music industry, relative to similar artists who do not have an HDC. Importantly, the daily growth of Spotify followers increases by approximately 3% more for female artists than male artists, given an HDC-associated song. Our findings shed new light on the role of social media with respect to artist self-promotion, especially in making the music more inclusive and attractive to female music artists

Quantifying Social Influence in an Online Music Community

This paper studies two types of social influence in an online music community: observational learning influence based on aggregate consumption data, and social network influence based on music consumption by friends in social proximity. The analysis uses a variety of empirical methods, applied to highly granular user listening and “favoriting” behavior on the largest music blog aggregator site. Our analysis finds positive evidence for observational learning effects, but no evidence for social network influence. Thus, any social influence in this music context is channeled through popularity cues offered by aggregate consumption statistics, rather than contact and communication with friends in close social proximity. We discuss implications of these results for research and practice

Gender Gating? Addressing Congestion to Improve Women\u27s Welfare on Online Matching Platforms

The problem of worsening gender skew is particularly damaging in the context of matching platforms since it affects the welfare and user experience of women participants. In this paper, we look at how a platform-level intervention could reduce the congestion for women and thus improve their overall user experience on the platform. We specifically look at a form of gender gating intervention in a leading matrimonial platform within one of their sub-domains. The intervention restricts the profile visibility of women users based on age, education, income, and marital status related to social norms. Our analysis shows that the platform-level intervention had the desired effect – women in the treatment group received fewer unwanted requests for contacts, experienced more matches, and initiated more contacts themselves, representing a better user experience. Our work extends the platform literature by studying how platform owners can improve Women\u27s welfare on matching platforms through market design

Social Media, Traditional Media, and Music Sales

Motivated by the growing importance of social media, this paper examines the relationship between new media, old media, and sales in the context of the music industry. In particular, we study the interplay between blog buzz, radio play, and music sales at both the album and song levels of analysis. We employ the panel vector autoregression (PVAR) methodology, an extension of vector autoregression to panel data. We find that radio play is consistently and positively related to future sales at both the song and album levels. Blog buzz, however, is not related to album sales and negatively related to song sales, suggesting that sales displacement due to free online sampling dominates any positive word-of-mouth effects of song buzz on sales. Further, the negative relationship between song buzz and sales is stronger for niche music relative to mainstream music, and for less popular songs within albums. We discuss the implications of these results for both research and practice regarding the role of new media in the music industry

SOCIAL MEDIA, TRADITIONAL MEDIA, AND MUSIC SALES

Abstract Motivated by the growing importance of social media, this paper examines the relationship between new media,old media, and sales in the context of the music industry. In particular, we study the interplay between blogbuzz, radio play, and music sales at both the album and song levels of analysis. We employ the panel vectorautoregression (PVAR) methodology, an extension of vector autoregression to panel data. We find that radioplay is consistently and positively related to future sales at both the song and album levels. Blog buzz, however,is not related to album sales and negatively related to song sales, suggesting that sales displacement due to freeonline sampling dominates any positive word-of-mouth effects of song buzz on sales. Further, the negativerelationship between song buzz and sales is stronger for niche music relative to mainstream music, and for lesspopular songs within albums. We discuss the implications of these results for both research and practiceregarding the role of new media in the music industry

Monetizing Freemium Communities: Does Paying for Premium Increase Social Engagement?

Making sustainable profits from a baseline zero price and motivating free consumers to convert to premium subscribers is a continuing challenge for all freemium communities. Prior research has causally established that social engagement (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson 2013) and peer influence (Bapna and Umyarov 2015) are two important drivers of users converting to premium subscribers in such communities. In this paper, we flip the perspective of prior research and ask whether the decision to pay for a premium subscription causes users to become more socially engaged. In the context of the Last.fm music listening freemium social community, we establish, using a novel 41-month-long panel dataset, a look-ahead propensity score matching (LA-PSM) procedure coupled with a difference-in-difference estimator of the treatment effect, that payment for premium leads to more social engagement. Specifically, we find that paying for premium leads to an increase in both content-related and community-related social engagement. Free users who convert to premium listen to 287.2% more songs, create 1.92% more playlists, exhibit a 2.01% increase in the number of forum posts made, and gain 15.77% more friends. Thus, premium subscribers create value not only for themselves by consuming more content, but also for the community and site by organizing more content and adding more friends, who are subsequently engaged by the social diffusion emerging from the focal user’s activities