Calculating the benefits of sponsored data for an individual content provider

Sponsored content is a mechanism in which content providers can pay the operator of a wireless network to make their content free to end users. Such offerings have recently been introduced in both the US and Asia and they raise many challenging questions regarding which sites should be candidates for sponsoring and how much the service provider should charge the content provider. Recent papers have proposed models for the economic dynamics between the participants in the system but all of these models require multiple parameters including the expected traffic increase due to the sponsoring and additional revenue that the content provider receives for each extra view. In this paper we offer two contributions. We first describe a detailed methodology for extracting these parameters given access to traffic data and published financial reports. We then discuss how this type of analysis can be used to select sites that are candidates for a sponsored promotion.