Evaluating Digital Empowerment Models for Multi-Homing Content Creators on UGC Platforms

With the rapid expansion of user-generated content (UGC) platforms, digital empowerment has emerged as a crucial strategy for enhancing platform competitiveness. This study investigates how different digital empowerment models—no digital empowerment, free digital empowerment, and paid digital empowerment—affect platform outcomes. Employing a Salop model with multi-homing content creators, we analyze the impact of empowerment strategies on content quality, consumer engagement, and platform profitability. The findings reveal that digital empowerment functions not only as a technical tool but also as an incentive mechanism and structural supply adjustment strategy. It creates a behavioral feedback loop whereby empowered creators improve content quality, which increases consumer retention and word-of-mouth dissemination, thereby boosting traffic, advertising revenue, and overall platform profit. Among the three models, paid digital empowerment generally yields the highest content quality and platform profitability. The effectiveness of each strategy is moderated by creators’ data utilization capability, market competition intensity, advertising monetization potential, and word-of-mouth effects. These results provide theoretical and managerial insights into the design of differentiated empowerment strategies that align with platform goals and creator characteristics in competitive UGC environments.