Commerce-oriented revenue models for content providers: an experimental study of commerciality’s effect on credibility

Benedikt Berger ()
Additional contact information
Benedikt Berger: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Electronic Markets, 2018, vol. 28, issue 1, No 8, 93-109

Abstract: Abstract If content providers want to build successful businesses on the Internet, they have to establish viable revenue models online. Because selling content or ads is less profitable online than offline, content providers have begun to generate revenues by selling products or services related to their content. However, this incentivizes content providers to increase sales by manipulating their content and thus may harm the content’s credibility. We conducted a vignette-based online experiment to test the effect of content providers’ revenue models on the credibility of two different types of content. Although our results revealed significant differences between revenue models for one of the content types, we did not find evidence that users distrust content providers employing commerce-oriented revenue models. Our findings shed light on the relationship between credibility and monetization of content on the Internet and provide helpful insights for practitioners in the media industry regarding optimal revenue generation strategies.

Keywords: Content credibility; Content providers; Revenue models; Affiliate marketing; Content-driven commerce (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M15 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12525-017-0268-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:elmark:v:28:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s12525-017-0268-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ystems/journal/12525

DOI: 10.1007/s12525-017-0268-z

Access Statistics for this article

Electronic Markets is currently edited by Rainer Alt and Hans-Dieter Zimmermann

More articles in Electronic Markets from Springer, IIM University of St. Gallen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().