题　目：Private Messaging in the Creator Economy

嘉　宾：Yanting He (何彦婷), Ph.D. Candidate, Imperial College London

主持人：左思 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2025年10月15日（周三）9:00-10:30

地　点：上海交通大学 徐汇校区 安泰经济与管理学院A303

内容简介:

The creator economy is marked by intense competition for audience attention, a challenge amplified by algorithmic systems that often favor established creators, leaving smaller ones at a disadvantage. While private messaging (PM) offers a potential pathway for creators to acquire and retain audiences, many platforms have been hesitant to implement it, or even withdraw it, uncertain of its value and concerned about trade-offs like the cannibalization of public communication (engagement). Partnering with the world’s largest user-generated audio platform, this paper provides the first large-scale causal evidence on the impact of private communication on creator outcomes. Leveraging a quasi-experiment from the staggered rollout of the PM feature on the platform, we employ a future-adopter, staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate the treatment effect on the treated. We find that PM adoption significantly improves key creator outcomes: visibility (+9.2%), content consumption (+9.5%), public engagement (+2–7%), and follower growth (+6.5%). These benefits are strongest for emerging creators and scale with PM usage consistency, suggesting PM helps overcome the cold-start problem and algorithmic disadvantages. Contrary to platform concerns, we find no evidence of cannibalization; private and public communication are complements. Furthermore, PM adoption increases creator productivity, expanding the platform’s content supply. Our findings establish private messaging as a core strategic feature that delivers value for both creators and platforms, and we provide a generalizable methodological framework for evaluating feature rollouts in two-sided markets.

演讲人简介：

Yanting He is a 5th-year Ph.D. Candidate in Quantitative Marketing at Imperial College London, supervised by Stephan Seiler. She is passionate about understanding the evolving dynamics of social media, creator economy and influencer marketing. She designs and applys ML/causal tools to uncover the underlying patterns of the digital world and its profound influence on creators, platforms, consumers, brands, and society. Her work aims to advance equity and transparency in digital ecosystems and help emerging creators grow and stand out.

In her spare time, she enjoy Zumba, live music, playing the piano, taking walks with her puppy, and the joys of cooking alongside family and friends.

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