Abstract

The business model of traditional media has come under attack since the diffusion of the Internet. One of the latest disruption waves are mobile apps. In this paper, we analyze the effect a mobile app has on the lifetimes and lifetime values of customers of print media. For this purpose, we use subscription data and develop a model based on survival analysis that captures the interdependence between two content delivery channels, in our context the offline and the mobile channel. We apply our model to a large dataset received from a publisher who offers a newspaper in a print version and a version for a mobile app. The results suggest that there exists a complementary interdependence between these media, as having a subscription to one of them decreases the hazard to cancel a parallel subscription to the other one. Given this complementarity, we find that the mobile app increases the lifetimes and lifetime values of print customers and vice versa. We also analyze the attribution of these effects.

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