Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs

Monic Sun () and Feng Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Monic Sun: Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/sun/
Feng Zhu: Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

No 11-32, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, 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. This increase can be partially attributed to topics shifting toward three domains: the stock market, salacious content, and celebrities. We also find evidence that, relative to nonparticipants, participants¡¯ content quality increases after the program takes effect.

Keywords: Ad-Sponsored Business Model; Media Content; Blog; Revenue-Sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L82 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul and nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Sun_Zhu_11_32.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1132

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().