Understanding Users’ Content Contribution Behavior When Knowledge Can Be Priced

With the rise of the creator economy, content platforms are exploring ways for creators to monetize their content. An increasingly popular approach is enabling content creators to offer paid content directly to viewers. This paper studies whether giving creators the option of providing paid content influences their incentives to contribute free content. Our setting is an online knowledge-sharing platform, which started out as a Q&A community based on users’ voluntary contributions and later introduced a program that allows participants to monetize their expertise by hosting paid live events. We find that participant motivations for contributing answers are rekindled after the program announcement, whereas the contributions of the nonparticipants continue to decrease. Further analysis shows that the motivating effect of program announcement is more pronounced for less established participants or participants facing more intense competition. Moreover, we show that participants adjust their answer contributions according to the time and topics of their paid events. These results suggest that participants strategically leverage free content to boost their reputation and attract “eyeballs” for their paid content. We discuss the implications of our findings for content platforms and content creators.