The effects of brand loyalty on competitive price promotional strategies
Management Science
Lurker demographics: counting the silent
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The quality of online social relationships
Communications of the ACM - How the virtual inspires the real
Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
Place to Space: Migrating to Ebusiness Models
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Information Systems Research
NEBIC: A Dynamic Capabilities Theory for Assessing Net-Enablement
Information Systems Research
Digital music and online sharing: software piracy 2.0?
Communications of the ACM - A game experience in every application
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Information Systems Research
Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community
GROUP '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication
Marketing Science
Journal of Management Information Systems
Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Digital Piracy: A Competitive Analysis
Marketing Science
From Association to Causation via a Potential Outcomes Approach
Information Systems Research
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
The complex problem of monetizing virtual electronic social networks
Decision Support Systems
Crowdsourcing, attention and productivity
Journal of Information Science
Research Note---The Impact of Community Commitment on Participation in Online Communities
Information Systems Research
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The content industry has been undergoing a tremendous transformation in the last two decades. We focus in this paper on recent changes in the form of social computing. Although the content industry has implemented social computing to a large extent, it has done so from a techno-centric approach in which social features are viewed as complementary rather than integral to content. This approach does not capitalize on users' social behavior in the website and does not answer the content industry's need to elicit payment from consumers. We suggest that both of these objectives can be achieved by acknowledging the fusion between content and community, making the social experience central to the content website's digital business strategy. We use data from Last.fm, a site offering both music consumption and online community features. The basic use of Last.fm is free, and premium services are provided for a fixed monthly subscription fee. Although the premium services on Last.fm are aimed primarily at improving the content consumption experience, we find that willingness to pay for premium services is strongly associated with the level of community participation of the user. Drawing from the literature on levels of participation in online communities, we show that consumers' willingness to pay increases as they climb the so-called "ladder of participation" on the website. Moreover, we find that willingness to pay is more strongly linked to community participation than to the volume of content consumption. We control for self-selection bias by using propensity score matching. We extend our results by estimating a hazard model to study the effect of community activity on the time between joining the website and the subscription decision. Our results suggest that firms whose digital business models remain viable in a world of "freemium" will be those that take a strategic rather than techno-centric view of social media, that integrate social media into the consumption and purchase experience rather than use it merely as a substitute for offline soft marketing. We provide new evidence of the importance of fusing social computing with content delivery and, in the process, lay a foundation for a broader strategic path for the digital content industry in an age of growing user participation.