Video Views or View Time: Managing Platform Compensation for Content Creators

For content platforms, compensating content creators is pivotal to the success of a thriving ecosystem. Traditionally, compensation has been based on the count of Video Views (VV), which is directly linked to the platform's revenue from advertising services. However, to incentivize the creators of longer videos, this paper evaluates a new compensation model based on View Time (VT), which is emerging in practice. We develop a game-theoretical model to investigate whether transitioning from VV to VT is beneficial for the platform, creators, and viewers. We find that a higher proportion of long-video creators and a higher proportion of time-constrained viewers increase the profitability of the VV-VT transition. Furthermore, with a significantly large proportion of time-constrained viewers, the transition can lead to a Pareto improvement.