Value ecosystem models for social media services

•Two stylized models for social media platform ecosystem: Collaborative vs. Leadership Value Ecosystems (CVE vs. LVE)•Segmentation of user space in CVE and LVE are different.•Service level led by service platform in LVE is higher than that of CVE.•Value-creating (information-generating) capability of CVE is better than that of LVE.•User diversity is a key parameter for value creation in both Value Ecosystems.

This study presents the architecture as well as the SDPs (Service Delivery Processes) of two ecosystems—CVE (Collaborative Value Ecosystem) and LVE (Leadership Value Ecosystem)—for social media services, and analyzes and compares these two ecosystems. CVE and LVE respectively represent the traditional social media service ecosystem and a new (future) ecosystem governed by service platforms. In our stylized model, the architecture of the social media platform ecosystem (to be briefly referred as the ‘value ecosystem’) is composed of user group, SP (Service Platform) and CP (Contents Provider). Specifically, users are uniformly populated over [0,Δ], where Δ represents the span of users' preference for the social media services. We also emphasize the differences in the SDP and resulting service provisioning of the value ecosystems. Accordingly, the roles of players are different in two ecosystems. Multi-stage game models are employed for analyses and comparisons of players' optimal behaviors and the value-creation capability in each value ecosystem. In particular, the latter is measured by the amount of information created in the respective ecosystem. Our first analysis indicates that the user group is segmentized differently across the value ecosystems. Subsequently, following analysis presents equilibrium strategies of SP and CP. According to our analyses and experiments, it is more likely that the overall level of the social media services in LVE is higher than that in CVE. However, the total amount of information created throughout CVE is larger than that in LVE. These findings imply that the leadership of SP may boost or constrain the value ecosystem. We also demonstrate that the user diversity measured by Δ is another key parameter for value creation in these ecosystems.