INTRODUCTION A major outbreak of West Nile Virus was seen last year in different parts of the United States. Adequate dissemination of correct information about the disease would have helped decrease its spread and the associated panic in the general population. In this study, we looked into the use of YouTube as a resource for providing information about West Nile Virus infection. OBJECTIVE ...

U content is increasingly created through the collaborative efforts of multiple individuals. In this paper, we argue that the value of collaborative user-generated content is a function both of the direct efforts of its contributors and of its embeddedness in the content–contributor network that creates it. An analysis of Wikipedia’s WikiProject Medicine reveals a curvilinear relationship betwe...

We leverage a temporary block of the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo due to political events, to estimate the causal effect of online word-of-mouth content on product demand in the context of TV show viewership. Based on this source of exogenous variation, we estimate an elasticity of TV show ratings (market share in terms of viewership) with respect to the number of relevant comments...

We investigate the causal effect of tweets on product demand using variation in microblogging caused by a partial block of the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo due to political events. We analyze the effect of the activity decrease due to the block on viewership of a large set of TV shows that rely on Sina Weibo as an advertising platform. Using a set of difference-in-difference regres...

Unlike popular videos, which would have already achieved high viewership numbers by the time they are declared popular, YouTube trending videos represent content that targets viewers’ attention over a relatively short time, and has the potential of becoming popular. Despite their importance and visibility, YouTube trending videos have not been studied or analyzed thoroughly. In this paper, we p...

This research aims to identify the variables that contribute differential viewership of mobile-phone videos on YouTube. To achieve this, a Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) is employed examine correlations among various in randomly selected video database. The findings analysis reveal several significant and culturally insightful associations. Notably, subgenres such as melodrama (soap-oper...

This paper studies the impact of ad-avoidance behavior in media markets. We consider a situation where viewers can avoid advertisement messages. As the media market is a two-sided market, increased ad-avoidance reduces advertisers’ value of placing an ad. We contrast two financing regimes, free-to-air and pay-TV. We find that a higher viewer responsiveness to advertising decreases revenues and ...

The days of surprise about actual election outcomes in the big data world are likely to be fewer in the years ahead, at least to those who may have access to such data. In this paper we highlight the potential for forecasting the Unites States presidential election outcomes at the state and county levels based solely on the data about viewership of television programs. A key consideration for r...

Seventy-percent of Americans search health information online, half of whom access medical content on social media websites. In spite of this broad usage, the medical community underutilizes social media to distribute preventive health information. This project aimed to highlight the promise of social media for delivering skin cancer prevention messaging by hosting and quantifying the impact of...