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This study aims to investigate replies to the top 10 comments under Always “Like a Girl” YouTube femvertising video to gauge consumers’ responses regarding femvertising as well as relationships among commenters.

This study adopted a mixed research methods design. A user analysis and a qualitative content analysis were conducted to examine the replies of the top 10 comments with the most replies to reveal not only the topics but also relationships and patterns among those comments and commenters.

The user analysis found that across all the 10 comment-and-reply units, in 8 units, the user of the original primary comment, the conversation starter, was also the user who was targeted most often. The qualitative content analysis revealed four themes from the 10 comment-and-reply units: multilayered emotional responses, a gendered society, complex coexisting relationships and a melting pot.

The findings of this research offer significant extensions to the understanding of public sphere theory within the contemporary digital media landscape. By analyzing the nature of replies to digital advertisements, the study illuminates how various types of user engagement–whether it be inquiry, laudation, debate, or flame–play a critical role in shaping the digital public sphere.

The study underscores the importance for marketers to scrutinize both comments and replies to effectively utilize femvertising on social media, particularly YouTube. By understanding the emotional dynamics of user interactions, marketers can craft strategies that evoke positive responses and mitigate negative ones. Engaging with users who are open to changing their views or mediating discussions can also be beneficial, as can the use of AI tools to maintain focus on the content rather than on individual commenters. Such approaches can enhance the perception of femvertising campaigns and foster a more constructive dialogue within the social media space.

This study contributes to the literature by investigating the replies of comments, interactions, relationships and patterns among YouTube commenters that may generate valuable insights for advertisers and marketers to be aware of the possible issues and monitor the sentiment of commentaries, thus, developing effective strategies to better connect with consumers. This extends the understanding of public sphere theory in the contemporary digital media landscape.

Opaque selling has become popular among service providers in recent years. Although many researchers have investigated the optimality of opaque selling for service providers focusing on heterogeneous consumers, one question remaining unexplored is how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity in a heterogeneous market. This paper aims to determine the conditions under which opaque selling is optimal for competing service providers.

The paper takes a Hotelling model to characterize the competition between two service providers. The authors also consider the interaction between the service providers and intermediary. Service providers act as game leaders and determine whether they should cooperate with the intermediary to introduce the opaque service.

The authors find that two competing service providers do not always benefit from opaque selling in a heterogeneous market consisting of leisure and business consumers, and the competitive intensity plays a significant role in the service providers’ decision optimization. Opaque selling allows service providers to acquire more profit in a highly competitive market or when the market contains a large proportion of leisure consumers. Otherwise, it is optimal for service providers without introducing the opaque selling.

The paper examines the optimality of opaque selling for competing service providers, and provides the suggestions to optimize the service providers’ decisions.

The paper investigates how the service providers’ optimal decisions are impacted by competitive intensity, considering the interaction between the service providers and intermediary.

China’s globalizing Internet describes a situation where China is using the Internet as a tool or medium to transmit its voice on the world stage and enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system and the global digitalization process. Several concerns, however, exist regarding China’s globalizing Internet strategies. This paper aims to respond to these concerns and enhance the understanding of China’s globalizing Internet strategies.

This paper will use content analysis to trace the policy development trajectory of China’s globalizing Internet, including policy vision, policy-making agencies and policy tools.

The Chinese government has issued a considerable number of policies to regulate and promote the development of the Internet since 2014. The key trend that emerged from the analysis of China’s globalizing Internet policy is the cooperation among different agencies. Existing policies have comprehensively used the supply-oriented tools, the environment-oriented tools and the demand-oriented tools; and the last two tools have been used more frequently in recent years.

The analysis results contribute to understanding how China uses digital technology to enhance its influence over the global Internet governance system.

The purpose of this paper is to identify key countries and their focal research fields on the information divide.

Literature was retrieved to identify key countries and their primary focus. The literature research method was adopted to identify aspects of the primary focus in each key country.

The key countries with literature on the information divide are the USA, China, the UK and India. The problem of health is prominent in the USA, and solutions include providing information, distinguishing users’ profiles and improving eHealth literacy. Economic and political factors led to the urban–rural information divide in China, and policy is the most powerful solution. Under the influence of humanism, research on the information divide in the UK focuses on all age groups, and solutions differ according to age. Deep-rooted patriarchal concepts and traditional marriage customs make the gender information divide prominent in India, and increasing women’s information consciousness is a feasible way to reduce this divide.

This paper is an extensive review study on the information divide, which clarifies the key countries and their focal fields in research on this topic. More important, the paper innovatively analyzes and summarizes existing literature from a country perspective.

The concept of national fitness has promoted the construction and development of public sports. And how to effectively implement the layout of urban public sports planning has become a hot topic. Based on this, in the study, the layout and integration of the public sports cities in modern cities for the national fitness were mainly discussed. First of all, the research background of the planning and layout of public sports in modern cities under the concept of national fitness was expounded, and the development of urban public sports theory was briefly outlined. Then, the planning and layout of public fitness in modern cities were analyzed. Finally, through the planning and construction projects of public sports in modern cities, the design of public fitness corridor, community road and Sports Park was carried out. It is proved that the scientific and rational planning of sports cities can promote the development of the city.

The rise and popularity of digitalization have made the addictive use in the virtual world more common, which has aroused wide attention from academia and public. Uncovering the underlying mechanism of addictive use is essential to address this serious issue.

By utilizing the context of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), this study developed virtual-domain perfectionism of seeking excellence and avoiding failure from the dual process model of perfectionism and identified four affordances in MMOGs from the perspective of technology affordance. The authors surveyed 302 valid samples in MMOGs to empirically test the research model.

The results demonstrate that two processes of virtual-domain perfectionism influence addictive use positively in MMOGs. Technology affordances perform as the antecedents of virtual-domain perfectionism and conduct distinct impacts in MMOGs. Specifically, affordances of interaction and identity are positively related to virtual-domain perfectionism, while achievement affordance is unrelated to virtual-domain perfectionism. Immersion affordance is positively related to virtual-domain perfectionism of seeking excellence and negatively associated with virtual-domain perfectionism of avoiding failure.

This study identified virtual-domain perfectionism and specific MMOGs affordances. The research model provides insights into addictive use in MMOGs by leveraging context and combining lenses. Research findings help elucidate the role of virtual-domain perfectionism on the addictive use from MMOGs affordances with the corresponding technical features.

Interorganizational power dependence has become an increasingly important factor for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to improve product innovation. This paper examines the role of power dependence in SMEs' product innovation trade-offs between exploration and exploitation. The article further studies the mediating effect of supply chain adaptability and the moderating effect of knowledge acquisition on the relationship between power dependence and product innovation.

The study proposes a model to verify the impact of power dependence on SMEs' product innovation trade-offs based on social network theory. Two conceptually independent constructs, “availability of alternatives (ALTRN)” and “restraint in the use of power (RSPTW),” are used to evaluate the power dependence. The model also analyzed how these effects are mediated by supply chain adaptability and moderated by knowledge acquisition. The authors test these relationships using data collected from 224 SMEs in China.

The empirical analysis shows that ALTRN has a more substantial effect on exploration for product innovation, while RSTPW has a more significant impact on exploitation for product innovation. Moreover, empirical data indicate a partial mediating effect by supply chain adaptability between power dependence and product innovation of SMEs. The results also show that knowledge acquisition positively moderates the relationship between ALTRN/RSTPW, supply chain adaptability and product innovation.

Overall, the findings of the study advance the understanding of the roles of power dependence in product innovation for SMEs. In addition, the research also uncovers the impact mechanisms of existing theoretical frameworks and extends the boundaries of the theory.

This study aims at exploring users' motives to form attachments within the social Q&A community context and identifying the differences between active users and lurkers when building emotional attachments. By utilizing the media system dependency (MSD) theory, this study investigates into the driving factors of dependency relations (understanding, orientation and play) to user attachments (i.e. attachment to the social Q&A community, attachment to content creators).

The research model is empirically validated by an online questionnaire among users of a social Q&A community. Deriving from the actual behavioral data, the authors divide 262 valid responses into 157 active users and 105 lurkers according to whether they post or not. The partial least squares (PLS) method is exploited to analyze the relationships in the model. In addition, the PLS-based multi-group analysis is conducted for comparing active users and lurkers.

The empirical results confirm that dependency relations (understanding, orientation and play) significantly influence user attachments. Multi-group analysis suggests that the effect of understanding dependency relations on attachment to content creators is stronger for active users than for lurkers. However, the effect of orientation dependency relations on user attachment is significant for lurkers but not significant for active users.

This study enriches the knowledge of the MSD theory by extending it to the social Q&A community setting. Based on the MSD theory, the relationships between three sides of dependency relations and two types of user attachments are hypothesized in the research model. Besides, the impact of user heterogeneity in building user emotional attachment still lacks consideration. This study is one of the first in the field of comparison studies to compare active users and lurkers in such context, providing a novel contribution in understanding the motivations and emotional responses of different users.

To dilute the financial difficulties in agricultural production and operation, the Chinese government has actively explored and developed rural supply chain finance (RSCF) service systems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and analyze the performance of RSCF systems in China.

To evaluate the performance of RSCF systems in China, this study proposes a two-stage data envelopment analysis model. Compared with other models, the model proposed in this study considers not only the technical gap between RSCF systems but also the maximization of intermediate output to conform to the practice of RSCF.

Based on the empirical analysis, this study draws the following four conclusions. First, the overall efficiency of China's RSCF systems is low, and there remains great potential for improvement. Second, the technology gap ratio index score and meta-frontier efficiency of RSCF systems in Central China are the lowest in all regions, indicating that the technical level of RSCF systems in Central China is the lowest. Third, the relationship between rural residents' disposable income and the efficiency of RSCF systems is U-shaped, and the efficiency of RSCF systems in the high-income group is far greater than that of other income groups. Finally, the main reason for the lack of efficiency in RSCF seems to lie in management and technology.

This study divides all RSCF systems into four types according to management potential and technical potential, and recommend corresponding improvement suggestions for different kinds of RSCF systems.

This study investigates how Danmu (danmaku) technological features (DTFs) of recommendation vlogs (rec-vlogs) impact consumer experiences and decisions.

The authors adopt the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique with a sample of 422 viewers of Danmu-enabled rec-vlogs to examine the proposed model.

The DTFs positively affect consumer loyalty intentions through the mediation of social presence and immersion. Also, vlogger-product congruency significantly moderates the relationship between social presence and immersion.

With the increasing popularity of vlogs, retailers have adopted the vlog as a new marketing channel to connect with consumers. Although a growing body of studies focuses on this phenomenon, little is known about how DTFs help to increase consumer loyalty toward using rec-vlogs as product information sources. Anchored on the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study investigates how pseudo-synchronicity, Danmu-content congruency and parallelism, three DTFs used in rec-vlogs, impact consumer experiences of social presence and immersion, eventually influence the consumers' loyalty intentions toward rec-vlogs. The authors also examine whether the effect of social presence on immersion is contingent on vlogger-product congruency. These findings have implications for both researchers and practitioners to understand the effect of DTFs in the context of rec-vlogs.