题目：Pay for Content or Pay for Marketing? An Empirical Study on Content Pricing

时间：5月16日15:30-17:00

地点：中欧平台武东路校区106

演讲者：Xintong Han, Assistant Professor, University of Concordia

摘要：The development of the Internet makes more and more people publish contents on the Internet, for example, uploading videos on YouTube, posting ideas on Facebook, etc. Interesting content brings many fans to these content providers and gives these user accounts considerable potential commercial value. Then a natural question is: what is the potential commercial value of a good content provider? Using unique data from a popular textual content sharing platform, we are the ?rst to answer pricing strategies of di?erent types of content providers when each audience needs to pay an annual fee for access to contents. Model estimates reveal that content providers weigh potential bene?ts of expanding their audience against costs of sharing revenue when they can spend a portion of their revenue on marketing. We ?nd that marketing e?ectiveness of di?erence types of content in?uences the proportion of users joining through sharing links and further a?ects the revenue loss. Our counterfactual analysis shows huge demand loss due to increased platform commission fee, which suggests that policy-makers should enhance the competition among content provision platforms for higher social welfare.