Abstract
In recent decades, multi-platform strategies have strongly focused on the production and distribution side of media industries. Lately, demand-side factors have become more important. For example, the impact on the success of movies of online communication and searching has increased. The article puts forward and tests, in the context of the German movie market, a method which may be used to measure and analyse growth dynamics and interdependencies among different communication behaviours taking place on multiple platforms. Pre-release web-monitoring procedures are essential to identify the nature of these dynamics. If there is positive feedback, more attention should be drawn to those platforms and vice versa. This study reveals strong intra- and inter-platform correlations. These findings, which point to strong path dependencies and an unexpectedly high degree of interchangeability among different platforms with different users, suggest that a more streamlined procedure for monitoring social media can be developed, which may reduce effort and cost. Increasing the reach of a trailer, the number of likes, and comments were found to lead to disproportionally low negative evaluations for movies. Based on these findings, multi-platform marketing strategies should aim to draw as much attention as possible to fan pages and movie trailers. Based on findings in this paper, marketing strategies for art and auteur movies should be widely spread. For blockbuster movies, online search processes were consistently found to precede online user communication. Providing information about the movie long before the theatrical release is therefore essential to increase the probability that the movie will be indexed by online search engines. The methodology of this article can be applied to other research regarding online user communication, such as success-factor research about hedonic and experience goods in general.
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