EXPRESS: How Does the Adoption of Ad Blockers Affect News Consumption?

Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news publishers that rely on advertising income tend to perceive users' adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the possibility that avoiding ads—which users presumably dislike—may affect users' online news consumption behavior in positive ways. Using 3.1 million visits from 79,856 registered users on a news website, this research finds that ad blocker adoption has robust positive effects on the quantity and variety of articles users consume. Specifically, ad blocker adoption increases the number of articles that users read by 21.5%-43.3%, and it increases the number of content categories that users consume by 13.4%-29.1%. These effects are stronger for less-experienced users. The increase in news consumption stems from increases in repeat visits to the news website, rather than in the number of page impressions per visit. These post-adoption visits tend to start from direct navigation to the news website, rather than from referral sources. The authors discuss how news publishers could benefit from these findings, including exploring revenue models that consider users' desire to avoid ads.

The Impact of COVID-19 in Delivering Customer Social Value through Supply Chain

An agile supply chain is important in a struggling post-COVID-19 economy to manage costs and to respond to customer demand. And, the ability to react rapidly is the key to satisfying customer demand. Supply chains, their re-organisation as platform-mediated ecosystems, are now primed for their biggest change yet. The Platform refers to a technology that allows open interaction between market players, such as producers and consumers. A digitised supply chain also provides opportunities for completely new revenue models beyond the redesign of processes. Specifically, a whole range of modern business models are able to monitor a product past the handover to the consumer, and on to actual use. The aim of this chapter is to explain the complexities of the supply chain during the age of COVID-19, which contributed to an improvement in social value for consumers, especially in digitizing the process. This paper is inspired by several sources, such as Deloitte Insight released at the end of 2020, which raises the future of mobility after the COVID-19 pandemic (Corwin, Zarif, Berdichevskiy and Pankratz, 2020). Corwin et al (2020) mention the term ecosystem when describing the reality of mobility during a pandemic. Viswanadham and Samvedi (2013), on the other hand, define the supply chain ecosystem as the elements of the supply chain as well as the entities that control the movement of goods, knowledge, and money across the supply chain. Today’s supply chains, as the final frontier, are being re-architected as environments coordinated by central networks. In this chapter, there are a numbers of case study about limited mobility during a pandemic that triggers service providers to search for innovative ways to survive. Second, with regard to numerous parties promoting increasingly large online shopping activities and enabling the home business sector to be easier and easier to enter the community, this is what is known as consumer social value. This case study will be taken from a variety of Asian countries, one of which is Indonesia. Third, the next challenge facing businesses in managing supply chains will raise the social value of consumers, especially when the pandemic ends.

Ads and Fraud: A Comprehensive Survey of Fraud in Online Advertising

Over the last two decades, we have witnessed a fundamental transformation of the advertising industry, which has been steadily moving away from the traditional advertising mediums, such as television or direct marketing, towards digital-centric and internet-based platforms. Unfortunately, due to its large-scale adoption and significant revenue potential, digital advertising has become a very attractive and frequent target for numerous cybercriminal groups. The goal of this study is to provide a consolidated view of different categories of threats in the online advertising ecosystems. We begin by introducing the main elements of an online ad platform and its different architecture and revenue models. We then review different categories of ad fraud and present a taxonomy of known attacks on an online advertising system. Finally, we provide a comprehensive overview of methods and techniques for the detection and prevention of fraudulent practices within those system—both from the scientific as well as the industry perspective. The main novelty of our work lies in the development of an innovative taxonomy of different types of digital advertising fraud based on their actual executors and victims. We have placed different advertising fraud scenarios into real-world context and provided illustrative examples thereby offering an important practical perspective that is very much missing in the current literature.

The Free-of-Charge Phenomena in the Network Economy—A Multi-Party Value Exchange Model

The long-standing economic model is one where customers receive and pay for goods and services. However, in today’s modern network economy, why are vendors willing to provide free services and goods to free-riders at an apparent loss? The objective of this study is to provide a theoretical framework explaining why free network services emerge and how they work. This study adopted the multi-case study method, summarized 28 types of revenue model patterns from 51 indicative free network services, and inferred the causes for the antecedent conditions of each revenue model with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), in order to confirm the causal relationship between the various antecedent conditions, configurations, and revenue models as conclusive evidence. In addition, this study established seven conditional propositions via their links with related theories, which were taken as the basis for providing in-depth explanations of the revenue model of the free network service, and expanded the demonstration of the original network economy.

A digital platform for ethical advertising and hybrid business models for news organizations: are they greening methods for ‘news deserts’?

This article suggests that the adoption of hybrid business models coupled with the establishment of an ethical advertising platform could help counter the emergence of news deserts. The latter are geographic areas and policy issues lacking coverage because of the crisis of the commercial model of news provision. Three clusters of characteristics are used to streamline and compare business models: (1) revenue models, (2) patrons and their motives, and (3) legal frameworks for the incorporation of the organization. Hybrid business models are designed by mixing the principles underpinning the Benefit Corporation or the Low-profit Limited Liability Company (L3C), with the basic characteristics of commercial and non-profit news organizations. The term ethical advertising refers to promotional activities that non-profits and other organizations dedicated to social goals normally undertake, including marketing, fundraising, or public-awareness campaigns. Based on data published by the Internal Revenue Services, this article argues that a digital platform for ethical advertising could face a demand worth over $1 billion a year. Additionally, this platform could effectively match non-profits’ demand for an audience with a pro-social attitude with non-profit and hybrid news organizations’ need for additional revenue streams.

The Commercial Viability of Alternate Reality Games : A Proposed Framework for Profitability and Scalability

Alternate reality games (ARGs) utilize the real world as a platform for storytelling. These experiences deliver real world stories that may be altered by a player’s decisions and actions. However, these experiences were largely developed to function as onetime use marketing tools for particular products or services (Szulborski, 2005a). Consequently, ARGs evolved very little insofar as developing sustainable and profitable revenue models or any degree of scalability. As such, this paper will seek to coalesce existent research in the fields of ARG scalability and revenue modelling in order to generate a novel and theoretically sound framework for creating profitable and reusable ARGs. The major overarching elements within the aforementioned novel framework include design elements contributing to scalability, revenue modelling and experiential delivery. Leading with a brief discussion of dominant ARG elements, this research will draw on disparate existent research to support contributions to the consequent framework.