The Impact of Source-Based Salience Strategy on Content Consumption Behavior: Evidences from a Quasi-Experiment

Examiners: A/P Goh Khim Yong and Dr Joseph Williams

Title: The Impact of Source-Based Salience Strategy on Content Consumption Behavior: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Abstract:

On online social network sites (OSNSs), salience strategy contributes to the effectiveness of online content. However, since source and content are inherently linked in online social media, the heterogeneity may confound the findings. In the present paper, we rely on a quasi-experiment to draw the causal effect of source salience on news consumption behaviors and additionally to examine the moderating role of brand loyalty on the link between source salience and news consumption. By using a massive individual-level panel data from a leading online newspaper publisher, we reveal the impact of source-based salience (SBS) strategy on three consumer responses, namely the number of website traffic, the number of viewed pages, and view duration per page. In this study, we adopt the difference-in-difference (DID) approach as the main identification strategy, and further use propensity score matching (PSM) and three-way differencing (DDD) approaches to control for potential self-selection bias and unobserved endogeneity issues. Taken together, our statistically significant and consistent results suggest that source salience cues shape the consumers' judgment of content, and arouse their interests in news content and finally lead to higher engagement levels. Moreover, brand loyalty strengthens the positive effect of SBS. This study provides insightful implications for both marketing and information systems (IS) research, and enables marketers to optimally target social advertising under information overload environments.