The Causal Impacts of Short-Term Visibility on Content Generation: The Value of Platform Endorsement and Reducing Friction Costs for Exploration

Digital platforms face the challenge of encouraging creators to produce high-quality content in sufficient quantities. While many studies have focused on addressing the issue of under-provision, how to stimulate creators to explore new content domains receives relatively little attention. In this paper, we propose a widely adopted design, short-term visibility has the potential to motivate creators to engage in exploration behavior. Through a large-scale field experiment, we demonstrate that by introducing short-term visibility as an additional posting option, creators not only boosted their video volumes within existing categories (exploitation) but also expanded their video production to new genres they had never explored before (exploration). Different patterns of content generation were observed among subgroups, suggesting the increase in exploration behavior was primarily driven by inexperienced creators who sought platform endorsement on feedback collection duration or by those sensitive to friction costs. The contribution to the literature and practice are discussed.