Monetizing user-generated content : design and incentive

Abstract

With the proliferation of user-generated content online, many content platforms have been exploring ways to monetize content. A recent and increasingly popular approach adopted by many platforms is to provide creators with freedom to launch paid content (e.g., paid live events, priced consulting services). The goal of my thesis is to investigate questions related to content pricing and implications of such monetizing scheme within a platform’s ecosystem.

One major challenge for content pricing is to understand demand for content. In the first chapter, I adopt Orthogonal Random Forest to estimate heterogeneous price elasticity of demand for paid livestreaming content on a knowledge-sharing (Q&A) platform. We find significant temporal dynamics in price elasticity of demand over the entire event life-cycle. Specifically, demand becomes less price sensitive over time to livestreaming day and is inelastic on that day. Over the post-livestream period, demand for recorded version is still sensitive to price, but is much less than pre-livestream period. We further provide evidence for the mechanisms driving our research findings: consumers value the opportunity of real-time interaction with content creators, and also consumers face with different levels of quality concerns over event life-cycle.

In the second chapter, I evaluate the implications of monetizing content on platform’s “ecosystem.” Specifically, I seek to understand whether and how giving the option to provide paid content influences creators’ incentive in providing free content. Leveraging the context of the same knowledge-sharing platform, I find that the creators holding priced talks tend to contribute more free content on the Q&A platform than those using the free Q&A platform only. This effect is more pronounced with the starting time of Live talks approaching, and are larger for participants who have less-established reputation. These suggest that participants strategically leverage free content to boost reputation and attract “eyeballs” for paid content. This research sheds lights to the overall impact of content monetization on the entire platform ecosystem, where free and paid content are interconnected parts and might have spillover effects to each other.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Supervisor	Ying ZHAO (Supervisor) & Jia LIU (Supervisor)