Knowing whether users migrate to other apps or simply cut back on screen time is critical for understanding competition in the "attention economy"
Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do not charge for access to their platforms but instead sell audience attention to advertisers within the so-called attention market.
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What would you do if your favorite phone app changed for the worse—or perhaps disappeared altogether? While this has become a real-life question for many Twitter users, it is also a research question for Guy Aridor, assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg.
Presumably, you’d pick another activity to devote your time to, perhaps a different online destination. But understanding what this substitution looks like on a larger scale is tricky, in part because experts generally rely on prices to understand how consumers substitute one product or service for another.
“In an economics 101-style market, like for apples, if prices for some apples go up, we want to know, ‘do people substitute other kinds of apples, buy oranges, or stop buying fruit?’” Aridor says.
Yet there’s not an obvious price tag on most popular apps. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do not charge for access to their platforms but instead sell audience attention to advertisers within the so-called attention market.
So to better understand how app substitution works, Aridor ran an experiment to find out how consumers would react if they temporarily could not use Instagram or YouTube at all. Would people substitute another app of the same category, an app from a different category, or cut down on their app use overall?
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]