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The integration of social media and e-commerce has resulted in a rising phenomenon among individual content providers (ICPs), who used to offer free content, to provide consumers with paid content, such as online courses, Q&As or consultations. Despite the prevalence of ICPs’ content monetization, empirical research has rarely studied its underlying mechanism. This paper examines how the characteristics of free content contributed by ICPs on social media platforms influence their paid content sales, focusing on the perspective of human brand.

The empirical setting is an online knowledge exchange platform, where users are allowed to provide free content (e.g. answers) on the social media platform and launch paid content (e.g. lectures) on the e-commerce platform. A machine learning technique is employed to construct measures for the characteristics of free content, and fixed-effects estimation is presented to confirm which factors have a significant influence on the sales of paid content.

The empirical results show that the quality, diversity and expertness of free content have a significant positive impact on the sales of the ICP-paid content, with the brand popularity of ICP playing a mediating role.

This study is the first attempt to demystify the relationship between content contribution and ICPs’ content monetization from the perspective of human brand. The findings validate the effectiveness of the “Selling by Contribution” strategy and provide valuable insights for ICPs and social media platforms.

Social media (SM) platforms tempt individuals to communicate their perspectives in real-time, rousing engaging discussions on countless topics. People, besides using these platforms to put up their problems and solutions, also share activist content (AC). This study aims to understand why people participate in activist AC sharing on SM by investigating factors related to planned and unplanned human behaviour.

The study adopted a quantitative approach and administered a close-ended structured questionnaire to gather data from 431 respondents who shared AC on Facebook. The data was analysed using hierarchical regression in SPSS.

The study found a significant influence of both planned (perceived social gains (PSGs) , altruism and perceived knowledge (PK)) and unplanned (extraversion and impulsiveness) human behaviour on activist content-sharing behaviour on SM. The moderating effect of enculturation and general public opinion (GPO) was also examined.

Sharing AC on SM is not like sharing other forms of content such as holiday recommendations – the former can provoke consequences (sometimes undesirable) in some regions. Such content can easily leverage the firehose of deception, maximising the vulnerability of those involved. This work, by relating human behaviour to AC sharing on SM, offers significant insights to enable individuals to manage their shared content and waning probable consequences.

This work combined two opposite constructs of human behaviour: planned and unplanned to explain individual behaviour in a specific context of AC sharing on SM.

The development of the digital age has made data and information more transparent, enhancing the strategic perspectives of both buyers (strategic waiting) and sellers (price fluctuations) in their decision-making. This research investigates the optimal dynamic pricing strategy of the content product developer in relation to their consideration of consumer fairness concerns to elucidate the impact of consumer fairness concerns on the dynamic pricing strategy of the developer.

This paper assumes that monopolistic content developers implement a dynamic pricing strategy for the content product. Through constructing a two-period dynamic pricing game model, this research investigates the optimal decisions of the content developer, contingent upon their consideration or disregard of consumer fairness concerns. In the extension section, the authors additionally account for the influence of myopic consumers on these optimal decisions.

Our findings reveal that the degree of consumer fairness concerns significantly influences the developer’s optimal dynamic pricing decision. When a developer offers content products with lower depth, there is a propensity for the developer to refrain from incorporating consumer fairness concerns into a dynamic pricing strategy. Conversely, in cases where the developer offers a high-depth content product, consumer fairness concerns benefit the developer. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a consistent benefit for the developer from the inclusion of myopic consumers.

Few studies have delved into the conjoined influence of consumer fairness concerns and strategic behavior on dynamic pricing strategy. Our findings indicate that consumer fairness concerns can enhance the efficiency of the value chain for content products under specific conditions. This paper not only enriches the existing literature on dynamic pricing by incorporating consumer fairness concerns theoretically but also offers practical insights. The outcomes of this research can guide content product developers in devising optimal dynamic pricing strategies.

A case study is described of how the Open University Library is developing a pilot departmental Intranet with the open source package, Zope and the Content Management Framework toolkit. The approach is to manage and share content held in a variety of formats, develop workflow for creating and approving new content before it is published to the site, separate content from presentation in order to support easy maintenance and consistency, and locate information through metadata and full text retrieval. Designing the Intranet involved content mapping and identifying library staff’s working needs before developing the structure and site framework. The Zope CMF has proved to be a highly flexible set of tools for creating a knowledge sharing Intranet, but the drawbacks are lack of documentation and training in the UK.

This study aims to analyze iodine content in various foods and water.

Food and water samples were collected from rural and urban areas of different agroclimatic zones of Haryana State, India, and analyzed for iodine content by a standard method.

A wide variation was observed in the iodine content of cereals, pulses, vegetables, fruits and milk. The iodine content in water samples varied from source to source and from zone to zone.

The investigators could not obtain sufficient samples of pulses and fruits for analysis from rural areas as they are not grown by farmers in their fields.

The study is original and innovative. The values of iodine for various foods are not available in the literature, and thus data of the present study will be useful to researchers, nutritionists, food scientists and dieticians.

The authors expect that media and entertainment (M&E) providers will increasingly be challenged to offer consumers entertainment experiences that are more relevant, and therefore perceived as more valuable. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The paper looks at the authors' 2011 survey, which revealed four prominent types of “digital personalities” that are not age‐based, but instead are based on the combination of degree of access to content and intensity of content interaction.”

The paper finds that to move beyond merely distributing digital content, M&E providers should: think and act like business‐to‐consumer (B2C) companies, no matter where they sit in the industry value chain; target consumers' specific digital personalities; deliver holistic, relevant content experiences – not just content alone; and create new flexibly integrated, cross‐channel digital revenue models that can deliver value comparable to traditional models.

The fourth annual IBM Institute for Business Value digital consumer survey questioned over 3,800 consumers in six countries – China, France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA – to evaluate current and future digital content consumption behaviors.

Making digital content more social includes finding smarter ways to connect to customers, connect the ecosystem and refine content.

The paper provides useful information on making digital content more social and smarter ways to connect to customers, the ecosystem and to refine content.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the modes of digital content creation for digital libraries and discuss the associated copyright issues with the types of digital content.

Prevalent copyright laws in India in the context of digital content have been studied and issues related to specific types of digital content have been discussed.

In addition to two known types of digital content, namely born digital and turned digital, a third type, gained digital has been delineated. It is found that extant copyright laws, particularly in India, allow scope for forming opinions with regard to digital content thereby giving room for insecurity for digital content creators.

Copyright laws in the context of World Intellectual Property Organization and India only have been discussed.

The paper will be useful to digital content creators and digital library managers/administrators to understand copyright issues relevant to the digital library.

The classification of digital libraries based on content as has been delineated in this paper is an original work and has reported for the first time. The linking of digital content with the copyright issues makes it useful.

A fundamental internet marketing challenge is that consumers can quickly move from seeks to one web site to another if they cannot easily find what they want on a given web site. This paper address the web site navigational design issues associated with internet marketing.

A two‐year participant observation study in a UK tourism marketing organisation is provided in order to demonstrate a web site design approach in action.

Existing web site design approaches such as hierarchy charts and storyboards can assist in structuring web site content but do not necessarily cater well for making web sites straightforward to use by consumers. Human computer interface web site design approaches typically relate more to style, appearance and functionality than to structuring web site content. Web site content ranking and grouping can allow straightforward access to web site content, by making frequently required content the most accessible and by grouping related content for ease of identification. From a web site marketing perspective, the more accessible web site content relating to products and services offered, the more likely that such products and services will be purchased by the consumer.

If consumers are to use a web site and use it again in the future they need to be able to find what they require in a straightforward manner. Ranking web site content to present frequently required content earlier in the web site, and grouping web site content so that similar content appears on the same web page or on closely linked web pages can make a web site more straightforward to navigate. In a marketing context, the more accessible a web site, the more likelihood there is of repeat business from the consumer.

The originality of the research reported in this paper concerns the use of web site content ranking and grouping to design web sites that can enable straightforward access to information and transactions by consumers, and thus potentially increase both current sales and future repeat business.

Electronic content, today’s principal means for information exchange, is dramatically reshaping how businesses compete and meet their goals and performance objectives. Now that the essential structure of business information technology, the Internet and supporting software tools has been built, the competition for strategic business advantage is shifting to focus on how companies use these tools to enable their people to compete through ready access to relevant and critical knowledge as they need it. E‐Content encompasses the world of electronic office documents, e‐mails, sites on the free web and premium content from subscription and syndicated publishers. It is integrated through a variety of authoring and content sharing tools from search engines and evolving content aggregation systems to newer forms of real time communication and electronic authoring including instant messaging, blogs, and text messaging through cell phones and other portable devices. As the sheer amount of available information and means of use proliferate, the need is growing for companies to include knowledge sharing via electronic content as a key element in their overall strategy. The fundamental strategic issue is empowering the people and decision makers who drive the business with relevant information in real time. E‐content provides the core of the business and competitive advantage lies in the immediacy of access, exchange and providing a meaningful flow of real‐time to the people who make decisions and the people who execute them. This article presents a structured model of the e‐content playing field and demonstrates how the integrated system for creating, delivering, using and sharing e‐content should be factored into strategic considerations for all businesses.