YouTube: Time to Charge Users?

Anita  Elberse; Sunil  Gupta

Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2010 (Revised October 2010)

YouTube: Time to Charge Users?

Abstract

In January 2010, YouTube, the world's largest online video aggregator, was still seeking to become profitable. Was the time right for Google, YouTube's parent company, to charge users seeking to upload content, as some analysts had suggested—and if so, who should be charged how much and for what? Could YouTube charge users for downloading content, a model it was now beginning to test? Or would it be better for the online video giant to continue to pursue an advertising model, but perhaps broaden its services to advertisers? Describes the online video market as of 2010 as well as YouTube's offerings to users, content owners, and advertisers. Provides information on the site's revenues and costs. Also contains detailed data on online video users and usage behavior.

Keywords: Online Advertising; Business Model; Cost; Profit; Revenue; Consumer Behavior; Internet; Motion Pictures and Video Industry;

Format: Print

17 pages

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Citation:

Elberse, Anita, and Sunil Gupta. "YouTube: Time to Charge Users?" Harvard Business School Case 510-053, February 2010. (Revised October 2010.)

“Our goal is to be the kind of start-up that would terrify Nike—if Nike didn’t already own us.” Ron Faris, general manager of S23NYC, a Manhattan-based digital studio owned by sports apparel giant Nike, is on the phone with Adam Sussman, Nike’s chief digital officer. It is June 1, 2018. Two years earlier, Sussman was behind Nike’s push to acquire Virgin Mega, a startup comprised of Faris and his small team, which has since morphed into a studio that plays a pivotal role in Nike’s digital strategy. With the studio’s mobile app, SNKRS (pronounced ‘sneakers’), specifically, Nike seeks to strengthen its connection with the most fanatical of its fans—the sneakerheads—and “bring back the fun and emotion of buying,” as Sussman put it. Is Nike on the right path with its digital strategy and, in particular, with how it seeks to change the sneakers game and compete with rivals such as Adidas and Puma? Does it make sense for the company to pursue the kinds of innovations featured in the SNKRS app? And what kind of campaigns and activations should it prioritize in the future?

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2019

HOPI: Turkey's Shopping Companion

Sunil Gupta, Donald Ngwe and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in 2017 as Onur Erbay, CEO of HOPI, a multi-vendor loyalty platform, is contemplating a critical decision. The case chronicles the origins of Boyner Group, the parent company of HOPI and a major retailer in Turkey, and development of retail and customer relationship management (CRM) in Turkey over the years. Before HOPI, Boyner Group retailers were unable to trace customers across the Group’s brands or form insights about customers’ preferences and habits beyond what brand-specific CRM and loyalty programs provided data for. HOPI was born as the management team at Boyner Group realized the need to serve the customer holistically; the program was designed as a coalition loyalty program including non-Boyner retailer partners. The case provides a detailed overview of the design choices for HOPI—a mobile only app with its own currency, paracik, its revenue model, user experience, and how the company planned to leverage big data to segment the customers for retailers and increase purchasing power for customers. Since its launch in 2015, HOPI had 5.5 million downloads and 300 thousand daily active users browsing campaigns offered by over 116 coalition retailers that ranged from gas stations and cinemas to supermarkets and department stores. In 2017, Erbay, who had ambitions to grow HOPI beyond a loyalty program, was faced with harsh realities: the Turkish market was very price sensitive, several competitors had emerged since HOPI’s launch, and several retailers and consumers preferred discounts at the time of purchase instead of earning loyalty points for future purchases. Erbay was also facing pressure from the parent company to make HOPI profitable. Was it time for HOPI to pivot to the discount model and abandon its original concept? HOPI has provided a supplementary data set to allow for a more in-depth analysis of the program's impact on customer behavior and retailer profits. The data covers four years, two years prior to HOPI’s start and two years after, for two retailers in the coalition loyalty program. The data set includes all customers and transactions at each of the retailers, the final price paid by each customer, and whether the HOPI app was used as part of the transaction. In all, the data contains approximately 2.7 million transactions for 578,078 unique customers.

Keywords: Loyalty programs; multi-vendor platform; retail; big data; Customer Relationship Management; Mobile Technology; Business Model; Data and Data Sets; Competitive Strategy; Decision Making; Technology Industry; Retail Industry; Turkey;

Citation:

Gupta, Sunil, Donald Ngwe, and Gamze Yucaoglu. "HOPI: Turkey's Shopping Companion." Harvard Business School Case 519-057, March 2019. View Details

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YouTube: Time to Charge Users?

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