Evaluating Promotional Activities in an Online Two-Sided Market of User-Generated Content

Abstract

We develop a modeling approach to explain demand variation for an online platform of usergenerated content, and use it to measure the impact of marketing activities on decisions to visit the platform, and on decisions to create and buy content. The model explains individual-level decisions as a function of consumer characteristics, marketing activities, and behavior of other online users, allowing for the possibility of network eects and interdependence of decisions. Empirically, we apply our model to the Hewlett-Packard's print-on-demand service of usercreated magazines, named MagCloud. We use widely available aggregate-level data from Google Analytics and summary statistics from company reports, thus making our approach generally applicable. Our results show that content price and content creator marketing actions have strong eects on the number of purchases, while advertising by the rm mainly inuences visits and creation of content. We provide recommendations to the level of marketing investments and quantify the benets of free promotional activities from content creators. According to our ndings, 8% of MagCloud's prots are directly related to these actions. This type of free marketing is likely to have a substantial presence in most online services of user-generated content and must be taken into account when allocating marketing resources.

Managing User-Generated Content: A Dynamic Rational Expectations Equilibrium Approach

“…Likewise, our research is related to the burgeoning literature on UGC (Albuquerque et al 2010;Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006;Dellarocas 2006;Duan et al 2008;Shriver et al 2013;Ghose and Han 2011;Moe and Schweidel 2012;Zhang et al 2012) that considers the joint behavior of content consumption and generation. 5 Our research extends this work in two ways.…”

A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media

“…However, the consumption information can be retrieved from access logs. A small but emerging stream of work has begun to look at both content creation and consumption data (Ghose and Han 2009, 2010, Albuquerque et al 2010). Ghose and Han (2011) estimate a dataset encompassing users" multimedia content creation and consumption behavior using mobile phones and find that there exists a negative temporal interdependence between the content generation and usage behavior for a given user.…”

“…Ghose and Han (2010) find evidence of dynamic learning in such two-sided forums created by mobile Internet based multimedia content. Albuquerque et al (2010) use data from print-on-demand service of user-created magazines and find that content price and content creator marketing actions have strong effects on purchases.…”

Social Ties and User-Generated Content: Evidence from an Online Social Network

“…A growing stream of research also explores the e¤ect of user-generated content, broadly de…ned, on economic outcomes. These include Dhar and Chang (2009) on the e¤ect of blog posts on future music online sales; Dellarocas (2006) on internet forums; Duan et al (2008) and Chintagunta et al (2010) on the e¤ect of online reviews on movie box-o¢ ce performance; Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) and Oestreicher-Singer and Sundararajan (2010) on the e¤ect of book reviews on online book sales; Albuquerque et al (2011) on the interdependence between creating and purchasing online content and Zhang and Sarvary (2011) on competition with user-generated content. These studies suggest that user-generated content plays an important role in consumers decisions and competition, but are not concerned with its interaction with social ties per se.…”