Business analytics on digital content platform: empirical studies in social media and mobile app store

Abstract

As business analytics research, this thesis examines research problems inspired by two digital content platforms which have business value. Specifically, information diffusion in social media (a platform user-generated content creation and sharing) and mobile app display advertising in mobile app store (a part of mobile smart phone innovation platform) as the phenomena of interest. In the first study, I conduct an empirical analysis to examine the factors on information diffusion in social media. Social media has attracted attention as an information channel for content generated in heterogeneous Internet services. Focusing on social media platforms, I examine the factors behind information diffusion on users’ online social network. First, I investigate the effects of source influence and peer referrals on diffusion outcome. In next study, I address content dissemination with variations of influence in the case of content crossover from other services through hypertext link (URL) and content discrimination. Using 3,504,831 diffusion processes identified from real transaction data in Twitter, I conduct empirical analysis to support my arguments. I demonstrate the existence of source and peer effects on information diffusion. These effects vary when shared content is linked with an external service by a URL. Source influence and peer referral have a positive impact on cascade size in the content dissemination process. In the case of content crossover, the impact of source influence decreases. However, the impact of peer referrals increases in the process of external content dissemination. In content discrimination, content type with less processing fluency has same effect of URL. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed. As the second study, I investigate the effect of different app display advertisings in mobile application store and their interdependence. In mobile application stores, consumers are exposed to multiple advertising messages throug...