2025 - Working Papers: Management of Technology and Information Systems

This paper investigates the impact of video content on consumer engagement and sales, particularly focusing on mobile applications. Despite the popular use of videos in digital marketing strategies, their effects on engagement and sales, particularly within the mobile app domain, remain unclear. Employing a large-scale randomized field experiment and a lab experiment, the study scrutinizes how the inclusion of a video on a mobile app's product page influences consumers' tendency to download the app and interact with other platform features. The randomized field experiment, covering 53 apps and over 110,000 users, reveals that the presence of a video on the app's installation page decreased download likelihood by 4.2%, with 88% of this effect mediated by viewing. Notably, while viewing is generally negatively associated with installs, viewing the video to completion is positively associated with installs. Subsequently, a lab experiment in an app-store-like environment was conducted to delve deeper into the relationship between viewing and installations. In this experiment, all users in the treatment condition (video) on the app’s page viewed the video (via autoplay). The results indicate that the presence of an autoplay video did not significantly affect participants’ likelihood of downloading the app. These findings suggest that viewing a video per se does not negatively impact users' intention to download. In conjunction with the field results, they imply a self-selection process where, given the option to view a video, users who choose to view it are less likely to download compared to users who choose not to view. Our results suggest that the negative impact of video inclusion on app downloads is driven by the video's ability to reduce consumers' uncertainty about their fit with the app. This may discourage users for whom the app does not align with their preferences or needs, consequently leading to fewer downloads.