이용자 생산 콘텐츠 플랫폼 사이트 내에서 생산자 참여가 소비자 선택과 몰입에 미치는 차별적 영향 (The Distinct Effects of Producers’ Participation on Consumers’ Choice and Engagement on the User-Generated Contents Platform Site)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국경영학회
· 수록지 정보 : 경영학연구 / 42권 / 2호 / 529 ~ 551페이지
· 저자명 : 최정혜, 손정민, 박경민, 박선주, 정승화

초록

이용자 생산 콘텐츠 (User-generated contents 혹은 UGC) 플랫폼 사이트 내에서는 개인 이용자가 UGC 생산자로서의 역할을 취하는 것이 가능해졌고, UGC 생산자는 이용자들과의 소통을 통해서 UGC 제품의 성과를 향상시키려고 노력하고 있다. 본 연구는 생산자가 이용자간의 소통에 참여하는 활동이 UGC 성과로 어떻게 이어지는가에 대해 밝히고자 한다. 이를 위해 대표적인 UGC 플랫폼 사이트인 유튜브(YouTube.com)의 994개의 동영상 관련 데이터를 수집했다. 동영상 성과에 관한 실증 분석 모형은 각각의 동영상에 대한 생산자 참여와 제품 인기도, 동영상의 특성 및 생산자 특성 정보를 포함했다. 분석 결과 첫째, 생산자가 소비자와의 소통에 적극적으로 참여할수록 UGC에 대한 소비자 선택에 기반한성과는 향상됐고, 성과의 향상은 제품 인기도가 높을 수록 크게 나타났다. 둘째, 생산자가 소바자와의 소통에 참여할수록소비자 몰입에 기반한 성과는 감소했으며, 성과의 감소는 제품 인기도가 높을수록 크게 나타났다. 실증 분석 결과, 생산자 참여는 소비자 선택과 몰입이라는 두 유형의 성과에 대해 서로 상반된 효과를 보였다. 따라서 본 연구는 성과의 종합적 향상을 위한 생산자의 참여 수준을 검토하고, 제품 인기도에 따른 차별적인 생산자 참여 전략을 제시했다.

영어초록

User-generated contents (hereafter, UGC) are the contents produced by individual users. In addition to the conventional role of individuals as consumers, nowadays individuals can play an additional role as producers. Individual producers create their own virtual contents and share them with others, and some active producers try to communicate with their UGC users.
As information technology advances and diffuses over space and time, this UGC-related market has grown substantially with the growing numbers of participants and the high quality contents.
The popular UGC platform sites include: Youtube.com, Twitter.com, Facebook.com, and Wikipedia.com, which in fact belong to the top 10 Internet sites according to site traffic(Alexa Internet Inc., 2012).
There has been much effort to understand the mechanism by which online performance is determined. Well-studied measures include product sales(Van den Bulte and Joshi, 2007;Dellarocas et al., 2007), sales ranks(Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006), company profit(Liu, 2006;Chan et al., 2011). Key factors to derive online performance include product quality(Dichter,1966), word-of-mouth among consumers(Liu, 2006), producers’ particiation(Schwartz et al.,2011). For example, it is well known that product popularity has a positive influence on product sales(Kohler et al., 2011). Here, product popularity serves as a proxy for product quality and performance is measured using consumers’ choices. UGC platformsites provide users opportunities to not only select but also engage by reviewing products and making recommendations, and this kind of behavior can reflect consumers’ engagement(O’Hern et al., 2011; Schmitt et al.,2011). Thus, this research extends performance measures beyond choice-based ones and incorporate consumers’ engagement-based measure. On the UGC platform sites, producers can easily observe communication among users, and some producers participate in consumers’ conversation(O’Hern et al., 2011). Despite this growing producers’ participation, there is limited research on its effect on performance. On the one hand, producers’ communication with users can improve the relationship with users, which in turn increases users’ interest and promote product choice(Doney and Cannon, 1997). On the other hand, producers’ participation can inhibit consumers from speaking out(Kohler et al.,2011). Therefore it is needed to understand whether producers’ participation improves or deteriorates UGC performance.
This research collects data from Youtube.com in the category of ‘how to & style’ using snowball sampling. On Youtube.com, users can view videos and leave comments, and also upload video clips. All the video-related and users’ activities are collected and analyzed. The empirical analyses support all the proposed hypotheses. First, producers’ participation has the positive impact on the choice-based performance and this positive effect strengthens with increasing product popularity. This means that when producers of popular products communicate with consumers, the choice-based performance improves(Kohler et al., 2011). On the contrary,producers’ participation has the negative impact on the engagement-based performance and this negative effect gets stronger as products become more popular. This means that when producers of popular products participate in consumers’ conversation, consumers are demotivated and do not express their opinion(Dellarocas et al., 2010). Producers’ particition has the positive effect on consumer choice but the negative effect on consumer engagement. Therefore, in order to understand to what extent producers participate, both performance measures must be considered simultaneously.
Further empirical investigation provides the following practical guidelines to decide on the level of producers’ participation. First, producers of popular UGC should activily communicate with users. Avid participation by producers of popular UGC increases consumers’ choices to the much greater degree than it reduces consumers’ engagement, and collectively improves the aggregate performance. Second, producers of mediocre UGC should make discreet decisions and decisions should be based on the way that multiple performance measures are aggregated.
Third, producers of unpopular UGC should pay more attention to UGC themselves and try to improve UGC quality.

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