Sustaining Web 2.0 services: A survival analysis of a live crowd-casting service

Securing continuous inflows of user created content and promoting them to the potential consumers are basic yet critical tasks for many Internet businesses to succeed in Web 2.0 environments. Managers of Web 2.0 services need to quickly identify value-adding content and encourage the content contributors to keep supplying valuable content. This study surveys the previous literature to explain the lifespan of user created content and proposes a theoretical framework that considers three major stakeholders in the Web 2.0 business environments - content contributors, content consumers, and service platform providers. Based on the theoretical understanding, a model that explains the survivability of a user created content is developed and empirically tested using three months of log data collected by an Internet personal broadcasting service provider. The proposed theoretical framework provides researchers with insights into the interworking of the three major players in the novel business environments. The results of the empirical analysis suggest that content providers' commitments and positive rewards to intrinsic motivations, content consumers' acceptances and perceived popularity of available content, and the service platform provider's support for social network capabilities and popularity signaling mechanisms are important factors that Web 2.0 service providers must carefully manage in order to improve the longevity of value-adding user created content.