Winners, Losers, and Facebook: The Role of Social Logins in the Online Advertising Ecosystem

Abstract

Social logins, such as "Log in with Facebook," improve a website's user experience and therefore enjoy great popularity among content providers (CPs) and users alike. Moreover, they also enable the social network and the CPs to share data, which individually improves their ability to place targeted advertising. On the basis of a game-theoretic model that offers a microfoundation for CPs' competition for advertisements, on the one hand, and CPs' competition for users, on the other hand, we demonstrate the strategic effects of social logins in the online advertising ecosystem. We fully characterize the market conditions under which social logins are offered and adopted, and when the adoption is actually profitable for the CPs. In particular, we show across several model extensions that the voluntary adoption of the social login may yield a prisoner's dilemma outcome for the CPs.

Health Advertising on Short-Video Social Media: A Study on User Attitudes Based on the Extended Technology Acceptance Model

“…Digital advertising significantly influences users' attitudes and intentions to purchase [5]. There are many studies about the factors that influence the effectiveness of online advertising [6], video advertising [7], and social media advertising [2]. Although short-video ads are a promising form of online advertising, this ad form has not been adequately examined in the research.…”

Data Portability on the Internet

“…Formally, we therefore use the model proposed by Hotelling (1929) and assume that on a unit interval of length one -whereon users are uniformly distributed -, the incumbent CP A is located at x ¼ 0 and the entrant CP B is located at x ¼ 1 (see, e.g., Montes et al 2018, for a similar setup). Moreover, in order to highlight the effects of introducing a right to data portability on data collection, we consider that services are free of charge, i.e., users need to reveal data and CPs are solely financed by the exploitation of this data, e.g., by showing (targeted) advertisements which is the prevalent revenue model on the internet (c.f., Dou 2004;Evans 2009;Anderson 2012) and a frequently used assumption in the related literature (c.f., Choi and Kim 2010;Kourandi et al 2015;Krämer et al 2018).…”

Data Brokers Co-Opetition

“…In all the three latter articles, sharing a full dataset between firms never happens in equilibrium. Krämer et al (2019) set up a model in which a general-interest content provider (e.g., a platform like Facebook) offers a social login to special-interest content providers (e.g., a news site). If the social login is offered by the general interest provider and adopted by the special interest website, there are two effects: first, consumers enjoy and value the ease of logging in; second, both providers advertise more effectively due to the shared information.…”