Start Date
12-13-2015
Description
Contemporary content websites rely on users' social participation and payments. While previous research focused only on implicit encouragement to participate, we study website-initiated participation (explicit Call to Actions that require users' attention) and its relation to users' contributions. Our study, conducted on a high quality video content website, shows that users who are given such calls donate more money to the website compared with users who are not exposed to them. We also show that even one prompt is enough to increase users' likelihood of voluntarily engaging with the website. Moreover, we show that the sequence of participatory actions is crucial; when the actions are given in increasing order of effort, users tend to donate and participate more than when actions are not. We extend our results by presenting a heterogeneity analysis that shows connection between the number of videos watched by the user and its susceptibility to website-initiated participation.
Recommended Citation
Zalmanson, Lior and Oestreicher-Singer, Gal, "Your Action is Needed: The Effect of Website-Initiated Participation on User Contributions to Content Websites" (2015). ICIS 2015 Proceedings. 13.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2015/proceedings/SocialMedia/13
Your Action is Needed: The Effect of Website-Initiated Participation on User Contributions to Content Websites
Contemporary content websites rely on users' social participation and payments. While previous research focused only on implicit encouragement to participate, we study website-initiated participation (explicit Call to Actions that require users' attention) and its relation to users' contributions. Our study, conducted on a high quality video content website, shows that users who are given such calls donate more money to the website compared with users who are not exposed to them. We also show that even one prompt is enough to increase users' likelihood of voluntarily engaging with the website. Moreover, we show that the sequence of participatory actions is crucial; when the actions are given in increasing order of effort, users tend to donate and participate more than when actions are not. We extend our results by presenting a heterogeneity analysis that shows connection between the number of videos watched by the user and its susceptibility to website-initiated participation.