Content creators' participation in the creator economy: Examining the effect of creators’ content sharing frequency on user engagement behavior on digital platforms

Abstract

Content creators produce content around their interests, hobbies, and experiences and distribute and monetize it on digital platforms. This study, informed by two-factor theory, proposes an inverted U-shaped relationship between creators' content sharing frequency and user engagement behavior on digital platforms. The study further considers creator characteristics such as number of followers, number of following, and number of competitors as moderators. To test its hypotheses, the study estimates a fixed-effects regression model on a panel dataset of content creators collected using a web-scraping method. The findings indicate that as the frequency of creators' content sharing increases, user engagement behavior initially increases but then falls after reaching a peak, supporting the inverted U-shaped relationship. Moreover, creators' number of followers, number of following, and number of competitors negatively moderate the inverted U-shaped relationship. While previous research has focused on creators' strategies as an extension of advertisers' digital marketing campaigns, this study takes a creator-first approach and provides insight into creators' content sharing frequency and users’ responses to it on digital platforms.