User Contribution in Online Communities - the Influence of Advertising on the Effectiveness of Social Normative feedback

Online communities are common means to maintain and extend private social networks. In addition, they also offer new ways for enterprises to connect and collaborate with customers, employees, and business partners. However, key challenge for online communities is engaging community members thereby keeping the community successful and alive. This is especially true for communities, which leverage advertising as a source of revenue. A potential means to compensate negative participation effects and foster contribution is social normative feedback being known as one of the most powerful levers of behavioral change. However, we want to challenge the power of this instrument in the context of communities building upon advertising and propose a respective field experiment with 600 participants. Our findings will be important for the design of online communities considering or relying on advertising as a source of revenue.