Abstract
Social media is mainly offered free of charge. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many other applications are free to users. Hence, it is interesting to study how free-to-use social media achieves monetization. Previously, we have discussed the possibility of monetizing via social advertising. We will not reiterate this here but focus on an alternative approach to monetization of social media users: premium service or content.
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- 1.
It is worth mentioning that many of these studies focused on decorative, virtual items (e.g., digital accessories, furniture, and clothes for digital avatars), and social virtual communities such as Cyworld (Kim et al., 2011), Second Life (Animesh et al., 2011; Guo & Barnes, 2011), Habbo (Kim et al., 2012; Mäntymäki & Salo, 2013, 2015), and iPart (Shang et al., 2012), which are not commonplace social media platforms, e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and WeChat.
- 2.
This feature can be seen at Tinder’s official site: https://www.help.tinder.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046358932-Message-Before-Match-
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Martínez-López, F.J., Li, Y., Young, S.M. (2022). How Social Media Can Monetize by Offering Premium Service or Content. In: Social Media Monetization. Future of Business and Finance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14575-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14575-9_5
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