Passive, Active, or Co-Active? The Link Between Synchronous User Participation and Willingness to Pay for Premium Options

Social media-enabled business models have transformed the content industry. To increase users’ willingness to pay (WTP), many of today’s content providers have changed from mere content provision towards offering social content experiences. Recent research has confirmed that users’ participation activities, e.g. commenting on content, increase the WTP for social content services’ premium options. So far, social content has been available predominantly on-demand, only allowing asynchronous user participation. Recently, social live content services emerged, which facilitate synchronous user participation and enable so-called co-active behavior. With this study, we conceptualize co-active behavior as the interplay between users while co-experiencing content together, and empirically show that co-active behavior has a stronger effect on WTP for premium options than the classic forms of passive and active behavior. Our work provides theoretical contributions on the WTP for social content as well as implications for the management of social content services