Frontiers: The Interplay of User-Generated Content, Content Industry Revenues, and Platform Regulation: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from YouTube

Wlömert, Nils; Papies, Dominik; Clement, Michel und Spann, Martin (2024): Frontiers: The Interplay of User-Generated Content, Content Industry Revenues, and Platform Regulation: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from YouTube. In: Marketing Science, Bd. 43, Nr. 1: S. 1-12

Abstract

An ongoing debate among firms, rightsholders, particularly in the music industry, and policymakers in the United States and the European Union concerns potential changes to the regulation of user-generated content (UGC) video streaming platforms (e.g., YouTube). Currently, safe harbor provisions protect platforms from liability for copyright-infringing content uploaded by users, and requirements for compensating rightsholders for UGC are weak, resulting in comparatively low payouts. At the same time, it is unclear how a change in these regulations would affect consumer demand for this content on other platforms with higher payouts (e.g., Spotify), that is, whether UGC platforms stimulate or displace demand on other platforms. We study a quasi-experiment that occurred when numerous songs became available as UGC on YouTube after an agreement between YouTube and the German royalty collecting society. Our analysis of an unprecedented data set covering 600,000 songs by 38,000 artists reveals an intriguing finding: Although UGC availability stimulates demand in other streaming channels for most songs, cannibalization occurs for recent releases and hit releases, turning the overall revenue effect negative. We discuss how policymakers can use these findings to understand the implications of changes in regulation, and how labels and artists can decide which content to block or allow on UGC platforms.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Keywords: user-generated content; digital platform regulation; safe harbor; channel cannibalization; difference-in-difference; quasi-experiment; music streaming
• Fakultät: Betriebswirtschaft > Institut für Electronic Commerce und Digitale Märkte
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 330 Wirtschaft
• ISSN: 0732-2399
• Bemerkung: Published Online:27 Oct 2023
• Sprache: Englisch