Journal ArticleDOI
Content or community? a digital business strategy for content providers in the social age
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TLDR
In this article, the authors show that willingness to pay for premium services is strongly associated with the level of community participation of the user and the volume of content consumption on Last.fm, a site offering both music consumption and online community features.Abstract:
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.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights
TL;DR: The time is right to rethink the role of IT strategy, from that of a functional-level strategy--aligned but essentially always subordinate to business strategy--to one that reflects a fusion between IT strategy and business strategy, herein termed digital business strategy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding digital transformation: A review and a research agenda
TL;DR: A framework of digital transformation articulated across eight building blocks is built that foregrounds digital transformation as a process where digital technologies create disruptions triggering strategic responses from organizations that seek to alter their value creation paths while managing the structural changes and organizational barriers that affect the positive and negative outcomes of this process.
Journal ArticleDOI
Digital Transformation Strategies
TL;DR: An important approach is to formulate a digital transformation strategy that serves as a central concept to integrate the entire coordination, prioritization, and implementation of digital transformations within a firm.
Journal ArticleDOI
Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future
Kawaljeet Kaur Kapoor,Kuttimani Tamilmani,Nripendra P. Rana,Pushp P. Patil,Yogesh K. Dwivedi,Sridhar P. Nerur +5 more
TL;DR: The integrated view of the extant literature that the study presents can help avoid duplication by future researchers, whilst offering fruitful lines of enquiry to help shape research for this emerging field of social media research.
Journal ArticleDOI
What drives purchase intention for paid mobile apps? - An expectation confirmation model with perceived value
TL;DR: Value-for-money, app rating and free alternatives to paid apps were found to have a direct impact on intention to purchase paid apps, and there was a significant difference between potential users and actual users.
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