TO BELIEVE OR NOT TO BELIEVE – INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF COMMERCE-ORIENTED MEDIA REVENUE MODELS ON CONTENT CREDIBILITY

Many content providers still struggle to establish viable revenue models on the Internet and thus try to tap new sources of income. Using content to drive sales of related products or services such as in affiliate marketing or content-driven commerce appears to be a promising solution for this issue. However, these commerce-oriented revenue models may cast doubt on the credibility of the content, which is an important success factor for the providers. Drawing upon credibility concepts and information processing theories from communication science, we conducted a vignette-based online experiment to investigate whether content credibility is affected by the provider’s revenue model. Participants in the experiment were shown a screenshot of a website, which was monetized either by advertising, affiliate marketing or content-driven commerce. Our results indicate that content credibility in the affiliate marketing scenario was higher than in the content-driven commerce or the advertising scenario. A mediation analysis revealed that this effect was mediated by the content provider’s trustworthiness. Our findings shed light on the relationship between credibility and monetization of content on the Internet. Moreover, they are helpful for practitioners in the media industry in designing optimal revenue generation strategies

Dietary resource analysis of two coexisting stickleback species (Gasterosteus aculeatus and Pungitius pungitius)

Masteroppgave i genomikk - Nord universitet 202

Hedonic Information Systems: What We Know and What We Don\u27t Know

Users spend an increasing amount of time with pleasure-oriented technologies, such as video games or digital entertainment services, and these systems are of growing relevance as a business segment. In the light of this development, the information systems (IS) discipline has been criticized for dedicating insufficient research effort to these types of system, which are referred to as hedonic IS. Therefore, we conducted a descriptive literature review within the top 40 IS journals to summarize past research on hedonic IS and to identify research gaps. To structure our analysis, we separated the studies in our sample between those taking a user and those taking a provider perspective, assigned them to the phases of two life cycle models, and categorized the studies according to the investigated system type. The results reveal that hedonic IS research mostly takes a user perspective, predominantly addresses the (continued) use phase of the user life cycle, and investigates five different system types. Based on our findings, we point out promising opportunities for future research. Thus, our review may help researchers to plan further studies on hedonic IS

MEDIA MEETS RETAIL – RE-EVALUATING CONTENT QUALITY IN THE CONTEXT OF B2C E-COMMERCE

In the increasingly competitive Internet business landscape, content is more and more employed for marketing purposes. While online retailers are raising investments in content to promote their online shops, media companies are starting to monetize their content by building own e-commerce platforms. The rationale behind these content-driven commerce approaches is to create a satisfying online shopping experience and, thus, to foster customer loyalty. However, whether content is a suitable means to these ends has not yet been proven. One obstacle is that there is no measurement instrument that captures all relevant characteristics of content on a website. We seek to fill this gap by developing a unified content quality scale in the context of B2C e-commerce. In this paper, we report on the first two of five steps in the scale development process and provide an initial proposal for a formativeformative second-order content quality construct. In contrast to previous measures, our scale considers hedonic characteristics of content and thus contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the concept. Furthermore, both media companies and online retailers can benefit from this scale by applying it to evaluate the effects of their content-driven commerce approaches on customer satisfaction and loyalty

ESCAPING REALITY: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF PRESENCE AND ESCAPISM IN USER ADOPTION OF VIRTUAL REALITY GLASSES

The development of virtual reality (VR) glasses such as the Oculus Rift has made VR technologies available to the mass market. The rapid diffusion of VR glasses holds the potential to disrupt the way media is consumed. Yet little is known about their acceptance by consumers. This study seeks to explore the user acceptance of VR glasses, considering the specifics of hedonic information systems in consumer settings. Focusing on user personality, namely the users’ desire to escape reality, we developed a framework based on the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) and tested it in a laboratory study with 155 participants. The structural equation model results show that VR glasses’ ability to induce presence, a sense of being in another environment, is a key characteristic of the technology that influences the adoption. We found the users’ escapism tendency to be a distinctive user personality trait for determining the adoption of VR glasses. Our study provides insights into the adoption of technology in early diffusion stages and the role of technology characteristics and personality traits in adoption decisions. Finally, our findings have important implications for practitioners in the VR industry

Effective and Efficient Data Access in the Versatile Web Query Language Xcerpt

Access to Web data has become an integral part of many applications and services. In the past, such data has usually been accessed through human-tailoredHTMLinterfaces.Nowadays, rich client interfaces in desktop applications or, increasingly, in browser-based clients ease data access and allow more complex client processing based on XML or RDF data retrieved throughWeb service interfaces. Convenient specifications of the data processing on the client and flexible, expressive service interfaces for data access become essential in this context.Web query languages such as XQuery, XSLT, SPARQL, or Xcerpt have been tailored specifically for such a setting: declarative and efficient access and processing ofWeb data. Xcerpt stands apart among these languages by its versatility, i.e., its ability to access not just oneWeb format but many. In this demonstration, two aspects of Xcerpt are illustrated in detail: The first part of the demonstration focuses on Xcerpt’s pattern matching constructs and rules to enable effective and versatile data access. It uses a concrete practical use case from bibliography management to illustrate these language features. Xcerpt’s visual companion language visXcerpt is used to provide an intuitive interface to both data and queries. The second part of the demonstration shows recent advancements in Xcerpt’s implementation focusing on experimental evaluation of recent complexity results and optimization techniques, as well as scalability over a number of usage scenarios and input sizes

Will They Stay or Will They Go? An Examination of the Factors Influencing User Loyalty towards News Websites

Owing to the increased competition in electronic markets, customer loyalty has become an important success factor in e-business. However, the antecedents of customer loyalty differ between business domains. While the formation of customer loyalty in e-commerce has been studied extensively, little is known about how loyalty towards news websites develops. Integrating findings from uses and gratifications research into DeLone and McLean’s theory on information systems success, we built a quality-value-satisfaction-loyalty chain for news websites. To test our research model, we conducted a survey and applied partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results reveal that loyalty towards news websites depends on both utilitarian and hedonic value perceptions, which, in turn, are influenced by content quality. Our study combines communication, information systems, as well as marketing research theories and has important implications for news website providers

Why Another Customer Channel? Consumers’ Perceived Benefits and Costs of Voice Commerce

Owing to rapidly increasing adoption rates of voice assistants (VAs), integrating voice commerce as a new customer channel is among the top objectives of businesses’ current voice initiatives. However, customers are reluctant to use their VAs for shopping; a tendency not explained by extant literature. Therefore, this research aims to understand consumers’ perceived benefits and costs when using voice commerce, based on a theoretical framework derived from prior literature and the theory of reasoned action. We evaluated and extended this framework by analyzing 30 semi-structured interviews with smart speaker users. According to our results voice commerce consumers perceive benefits in terms of efficiency, convenience, and enjoyment, and criticize the perceived costs of limited transparency, lack of trust, lack of control, and low technical maturity. The resulting model sheds light on the promoters and inhibitors of voice commerce and provides guidelines that enable practitioners to design and improve voice commerce applications