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

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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.

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Notes

  1. We want to emphasize that the type of content is not treated as an independent variable in our experiment but is used to build two separate vignette groups. This is also reflected in the formulation of our hypotheses. The reason for this design is that it is not feasible to create articles that are identical in every aspect but their relation towards notebooks. In fact, the two articles used in our experiment may not only differ with respect to this aspect but also in style or understandability, for instance. Therefore, we conducted our experiment within these two groups but did not compare the results between these directly.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on the third essay of the author’s dissertation. The author thanks the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments during the review process. He is also grateful to Thu Mai Nguyen for first insights into credibility research and to PACIS 2016 participants for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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  1. Institute for Information Systems and New Media, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Ludwigstraße 28 VG, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Benedikt Berger

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Responsible Editors: Ioanna Constantiou and Hans-Dieter Zimmermann

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Frequency distribution of demographic variables and online shopping for PRC vignette group
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Table 8 Frequency distribution of demographic variables and online shopping for CRC vignette group
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Table 9 Means and standard deviations of control variables for PRC vignette group
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Table 10 Means and standard deviations of control variables for CRC vignette group
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Berger, B. Commerce-oriented revenue models for content providers: an experimental study of commerciality’s effect on credibility. Electron Markets 28, 93–109 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-017-0268-z

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