CREATING VALUE ON LARGE ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORK SITES (SNS): THE CASE FOR USERS, PROVIDERS AND ADVERTISERS

Abstract

Online social network sites (SNS) have emerged as some of the most popular venues on the Internet. With rapid growth of SNS, a wide range of stakeholders, from individual users to the platform owners, digital marketers and policy makers have become interested in understanding how user engagement on these platforms generate value. While there has been a growing stream of scholarly work in the area of value creation in organizational settings, this dissertation contributes towards developing (i) an understanding of what constitutes value on large and online social networks, and (ii) how users engage with each other, as well as with the platform to create such value for the different stakeholders. In this dissertation, I have taken a computational social science approach to studying three instances of such value creation on the SNS, aimed at (i) external brands and advertisers, (ii) the SNS users and (iii) the SNS provider respectively.