Electronic word-of-mouth, box office revenue and social media

• Published in: Electronic commerce research and applications 2017-03, Vol.22, p.13-23
• Main Authors: Baek, Hyunmi, Oh, Sehwan, Yang, Hee-Dong, Ahn, JoongHo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Box office effects; Electronic word-of-mouth; Innovation diffusion; Interpersonal communication; Mass media; Movies; Social media
• ISSN: 1567-4223; 1873-7846
• DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2017.02.001

•The influence of eWOM differs by period, based on the social media characteristics.•Twitter is relatively influential on movie revenue in the initial stage of opening.•Twitter shows high immediacy and diffusibility characteristics.•Online review sites are relatively influential on movie revenue in the late stage.•Online review sites show the characteristics of high persuasion. We investigate how electronic word-of-mouth through different types of social media impacts of box office revenue across different phases of movie screening based on Roger's innovation diffusion model. We collected daily electronic word-of-mouth for movies from February to October 2012 from Twitter, Yahoo!Movies, YouTube, and blogs. The results indicate that Twitter influences on box office revenue were greater in the initial stage of a movie’s opening, because of its high immediacy and diffusion characteristics. Yahoo!Movies was more influential in the late stage of a movie’s opening because of high persuasion characteristics. Since blogs and YouTube contain characteristics of mass media and interpersonal communication media, we found that there were no differences for the impacts of blogs and YouTube on box office revenue between the initial and later stages.