Inspired by the diversity of content provision and the importance of traffic revenue in media market, this paper investigates the pricing and advertising decisions for a media platform considering traffic revenue under three content provision strategies: single paid-content-without-ads strategy, single free-content-with-ads strategy, and hybrid content strategy. The optimal solutions among different content provision strategies are compared and analyzed, thereby guiding the media platform and consumers in choosing the best content provision mode, while also providing some valuable insights for the media platform in its decision-making. In presence of traffic revenue, findings show that the hybrid content provision strategy can achieve a win–win situation for the media platform and consumers, in terms of platform profit, consumer surplus, and decision-making speed, whereas the single paid or free content provision strategy cannot achieve such a situation. We also surprisingly find that the media content with higher quality fails in creating more welfare for consumers, when the traffic revenue sensitivity coefficient and the free content’s quality discount factor are high. Numerical experiments verify the theoretical results. We also study two model extensions of endogenous content quality and platforms competition, and find that the major findings of the base model are robust.

受媒体市场中内容提供的多样性和流量收入重要性的启发，本文研究了考虑流量收入的媒体平台在三种内容提供策略下的定价和广告决策：单一付费内容无广告策略、单一免费策略-内容与广告策略和混合内容策略。对不同内容提供策略之间的最优方案进行比较和分析，从而指导媒体平台和消费者选择最佳的内容提供模式，同时也为媒体平台的决策提供一些有价值的见解。研究结果表明，在流量收入存在的情况下，混合内容提供策略可以在平台利润、消费者剩余和决策速度方面实现媒体平台和消费者的双赢，而单一的付费或免费内容供给策略无法实现这种情况。我们还惊奇地发现，当流量收入敏感系数和免费内容的质量折扣系数较高时，较高质量的媒体内容却无法为消费者创造更多的福利。数值实验验证了理论结果。我们还研究了内生内容质量和平台竞争的两个模型扩展，发现基本模型的主要发现是稳健的。