Small video content creators may be mightier than they look

Online video platforms often favour star creators to highlight, but a new CUHK study shows boosting small creators is essential for diversity and keeping loyal viewers

By Putro Harnowo, Senior Content Manager, China Business Knowledge @ CUHK

If you ask teenagers nowadays what they want to be growing up, don’t be surprised if many of them answer: influencer. Social media encourages youngsters to be famous. While the popularity of platforms varies from place to place, short videos have gained significant traction, with TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts continuing to attract viewers.

“Viewers access the partner platform freely to consume extensive video content spanning entertainment, education, sports, lifestyle, and other interests,” says Philip Zhang Renyu, Associate Professor of the Department of Decisions, Operations and Technology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School. “A portion of the platform revenue gets shared with creators, incentivising them for continued content production.”

The brain behind the success is the algorithm that suggests unlimited videos on the recommendation page to viewers, displaying a seamless scrolling feed appealing to their interests. However, these recommendations often prefer popular creators with massive followers while neglecting less-known creators, putting the glass ceiling on small and emerging talents trying to seek a name for themselves.

Highlighting content from popular creators may maximise user engagement, but viewers may later find platforms no longer attractive to fulfil their wide spectrum of tastes. As algorithms play a crucial role in driving content and user engagement, which directly impacts the platform’s ability to attract advertisers and generate revenue, video platforms have to tread carefully.

In a study titled Viewer traffic allocation for small creator development: Experimental evidence from short-video platforms, Professor Zhang and his PhD student, Hu Qinlu, along with Ni Huang of the University of Miami, explored the value of the content from small creators in user engagement, as well as the efficacy of traffic allocation in motivating small creators to improve their content.

The hidden power of small creators

The researchers partnered with a leading online short video-sharing platform in Asia to conduct two field experiments. In the first experiment, the platform split viewers into two groups: the treatment group and the control group. The control group had 9,065,114 viewers, and the treatment group had 4,532,431 viewers.

Viewers in the treatment group were assigned content from small creators whose half of the videos were removed from their recommendation pages. Viewers in the control group received no intervention, which means they were exposed to normal recommendation pages without any modification.

“To maximise viewer engagement, a platform should support and promote small creators to keep active viewers engaged. At the same time, it should attract and retain less active viewers by offering popular, high-quality content from star creators.”

Professor Philip Zhang Renyu

Small creators are defined as those who have historically attained less than one thousand followers, which comprise around 99 per cent of the platform’s population. The result showed that reducing content from small creators at first seemed beneficial for engagement. The content from small creators might be perceived as low quality.

However, as a result of reduced content, active viewers spent less time on the platform, while inactive viewers engaged more. Replacing recommended content from small creators with content from well-known creators was found to appeal more to inactive viewers, but not to active viewers. Inactive viewers prefer high-quality content from well-known creators, while active viewers seek content diversity and engage with smaller creators.

The researchers then investigated further by observing a random sample of more than 188 million creators and their content production behaviours in seven days. The results confirmed that when active viewers are exposed to less diverse content due to the reduced videos from small creators, they may find the platform less appealing.

Small creators are more likely to produce diverse content, and removing such content reduces consumption diversity, which may affect active viewers more than inactive ones. It bears mentioning that active viewers contribute the most to viewership and are critical to the platform’s success.

“To maximise viewer engagement, a platform should support and promote small creators to keep active viewers engaged. At the same time, it should attract and retain less active viewers by offering popular, high-quality content from star creators,” says Professor Zhang.

Not all small creators deserve merits

In the next experiment, the researchers assessed the impact of traffic allocation on small creators by increasing their content exposure. In the treatment group that received a modified algorithm, the platform gave extra exposure to more than 480,000 small creators to boost their viewership on the recommendation pages. In the control group, the same number of small creators received normal algorithms without any modification.

The result showed small creators in the treatment group scored 265.65 per cent more exposure and 289.81 per cent more new followers than those in the control group. This led them to increase content production quantity by 5.87 per cent without compromising the quality. Content quality is measured by likes, comments, and forward rates.

These positive effects are more prominent among popular small creators, who only take 0.83 per cent of the sample yet contribute to 79 per cent of the total viewership and 17.85 per cent of the total videos uploaded.

Meanwhile, the small creators in the treatment group only increased their content production by 2.89 per cent. The researchers then suggest that aided exposure can be optimally utilised if given to more experienced and emerging small creators.

Popular small creators are also more likely to engage with replies and comments when given additional exposure. Therefore, Professor Zhang suggests platforms to strategically allocate traffic to small creators that are relatively more popular to foster their growth and development.

“Our findings challenge the common belief that higher output may compromise quality, as our evidence shows that small creators are capable of maintaining their production standards even when the visibility is significantly enhanced,” says Professor Zhang. “It is possible that, upon receiving more viewer traffic, the small creators with motivation and passion for their content are able to scale up their production without sacrificing quality.”

Further delving into the history of viewership, the researchers found that additional traffic for small creators with low viewership in the past can motivate them to improve content quantity and quality, but those with consistently low viewership might not benefit much as they may lack motivation or skills. The impact of boosted traffic might also be less noticeable for small creators with higher past viewership, but more experienced creators may still be motivated to improve.

Finally, the research suggests that segmenting viewers based on their historical watching frequency helps optimise traffic allocation by tailoring content recommendations to active and inactive viewers, ensuring both small and established creators reach the right audience.