Mediaboss Marketing

Washington, December 12 (ANI): Researchers including one of Indian origin have found that social networking sites can drive advertising revenue by encouraging the density of social ties or boosting the level of friendship or social connections between users.

According to the findings of the new study, more connected users prompt increases in visitation and browsing on the site, which helps stimulate online advertising revenue growth.

The research co-authored by Scott Shriver, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, Harikesh Nair, associate professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Reto Hofstetter of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland introduces new techniques to determine whether more connected users generate more content and vice versa.

The researchers examined the history of social tie formation and content creation on Soulrider.com, an online community of windsurfers based in Switzerland.

"Prior work in this area has reported a correlational relationship between social ties and user-generated content," Professor Shriver said.

"Our work attempts to go further by establishing and measuring causal effects," he said.

To address the question of causality, the authors leveraged the fact that users often post blogs about wind speeds at their preferred surfing locations. After merging the Soulrider.com data with wind speed information from the Swiss meteorological office, the researchers were able to establish that wind speeds correlated with content production but not social tie formation.

The team was then able to explain observed content production in terms of factors independent of social ties, which in turn allowed them to separately identify the causal effects of interest.

"One of the main issues that site operators like Facebook deal with is how to monetize the content that is created on their sites," Professor Shriver said.

"Our research finds that the density of the links between users on the network is critical for the ultimate success of the social network. It's not sufficient to just get people to join the site - increasing the strength of the relationships is key to increasing page views and therefore ad revenue," he said.

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Social networking sites 'may lead to online ad revenue growth'