Lecture: Link to Success - How Blogs Build an Audience by Promoting Rivals
Professor Dina Mayzlin of the Yale School of Management will be the guest speaker at this week's Marketing Department Seminar. All are invited to attend.
Link to Success: How Blogs Build an Audience by Promoting Rivals
According to a survey by the Pew Internet Project, 12 million U.S. adults keep Web logs (or blogs), websites that provide commentary on various topics. In addition, 57 million adults read blogs. However, it is not obvious how readers find blogs that provide useful information given the multitude of blogs, the heterogeneity in their quality, and the lack of brand equity in this context.
This article attempts to explain the popularity of blogs, given these obstacles. We suggest that linking may be the responsible for the success of blogs. We explain why a blogger may choose to link to another blog, though doing so may result in losing a reader to that linked blog.
The proposed model distinguishes blogs along two dimensions: 1) the ability to break the news and, 2)the ability to link to other blogs with news-breaking stories.
By linking, a blog demonstrates its ability to link to news-breaking blogs in the future, though it also indicates that a competing blog is likely to feature a news-breaking story in the future. In equilibrium, blogs that are more likely to break the news are more likely to have incoming links and hence receive more visitors. The empirical evidence is consistent with the theoretical predictions.
Faculty profile page for Prof. Dina Mayzlin
