Journal Article

Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs

Sun, Monic, Zhu, Feng

2013

Overview

Many scholars argue that when incentivized by ad revenue, content providers are more likely to tailor their content to attract \"eyeballs,\" and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad-revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in September 2007. Participating bloggers allow the site to run ads on their blogs and receive 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. After analyzing 4.4 million blog posts, we find that, relative to nonparticipants, popular content increases by about 13 percentage points on participants' blogs after the program takes effect. About 50% of this increase can be attributed to topics shifting toward three domains: the stock market, salacious content, and celebrities. Meanwhile, relative to nonparticipants, participants' content quality increases after the program takes effect. We also find that the program effects are more pronounced for participants with moderately popular blogs, and seem to persist after participants enroll in the program. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

• Publisher: INFORMS,Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
• Subject: ad-sponsored business model / Advertising / Advertising revenue / blog / Blogs / Business models / Celebrities / China / Chinese languages / Commercialization / Consumption / Economic aspects / Economic planning / Economic policy / Empirical evidence / Empirical tests / Experimental methods / International economics / Management / Management science / media content / platform-based markets / Political economy / Popularity / Revenue / Revenue sharing / Securities markets / Services / Stock exchanges / Stock markets / Studies / Unobservables / User generated content / Weblogs