ABSTRACTThe heightened usage of social media and other digital platforms in the modern age has generated a large number of interesting and impactful questions for business academics and practitioners. Consequently, marketing scholars have sought to utilize the tremendous amounts of data available in the digital domain to better understand the behaviors of various stakeholders within these arenas. As such, I present two essays aimed at addressing questions housed in the digital marketing space. The first essay considers how the introduction of providing the ability to display mid-roll advertisements (MRAs) on a live streaming platform affects viewing consumption. Utilizing a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the results surprisingly indicate that the introduction of MRAs increases audience consumption. This study also provides evidence of the mechanisms, suggesting that streamers make strategic adjustments to increase viewership after the introduction of MRAs to collect ad revenue. The second essay explores how dark humor and slang usage in social media text impacts virality by examining data from a social and digital media site. By employing a number of tools such as content analysis and topic modelling (via Latent Dirichlet Allocation) in conjunction with a fixed effects approach, this essay provides evidence that social media posts containing dark humor are more viral than those without it, despite the controversial nature of dark humor. Conceptually, we posit that knowledge of the specific context is required to value dark humor. This relationship is further compared against informative versus persuasive posts, finding that the effects of dark humor are generally stronger for posts which are persuasive. This essay simultaneously explores internet slang, suggesting that the use of internet slang is also positively related to virality. The findings from both essays should be of interest to both researchers and practitioners.
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