Influences of e-WOM data on viewer ratings

Abstract

As media have evolved, consumer behavior for media and their contents were developed together. For the traditional market of television and the program that still maintain consumer power in terms of volume, that economic function had been studied constantly. Therefore, the stakeholders who are seriously interested in television program watching behavior are heavily noticing on so-called e-WoM (word of mouth). With this situation, several studies were performed to illuminate the effect of user-generated contents on the Internet toward viewing rates. But the attention for essential characteristics for both media content and user-generated content is considerably related to the celebrities consisting of the media industry and contents inside. Thus the analysis on checking the effect of consumer reaction’s volume toward celebrities was performed. We collected the data of generated articles and the consumer-generated comments inside for the television drama just until before its first episode, to capture the factor explaining the number of viewer ratings, or market share in the media industry. And it turns out that web buzz data volume talking about celebrities made a positive impact on television viewer ratings while other factors such as comprehensive user-generated variables or promotion volume made by content supplier side were not. The results show that the variable (the total number of articles received at least one comment in the comment section) was significant statistically and present meaningful suggestions for practitioners in an organization.