Staying for Discovery, Monetizing Elsewhere: Platform Governance and Complementor Bypassing, joint with Raphaela Andres, Michelangelo Rossi, and Mark Tremblay.

Work-in-progress, ZEW Discussion Paper Nr. 26-033

Digital platforms govern not only how ecosystem value is created, but also how complementors capture it. In this paper, we study how content creators respond when a dominant platform restricts monetization while remaining essential for audience discovery. Our setting is the 2017 YouTube “Adpocalypse”, an advertiser boycott that prompted YouTube to tighten content moderation and monetization rules, reducing the level and predictability of creators’ advertising revenues. Creators could partially bypass YouTube’s monetization layer through Patreon, a membership platform enabling recurring direct payments from users. Using monthly panel data on approximately 8,400 video creators active on Patreon between August 2017 and August 2018, we compare creators with a pre-shock YouTube link to creators without an observed link in a matched difference-in-differences design. Following the policy change, exposed creators increased their production of member-only Patreon content without reducing the number of freely accessible posts. They also accumulated paying patrons and recurring membership revenue at a significantly faster monthly rate, corresponding to a differential increase of approximately 9%. The increase in paid content was strongest among creators whose content faced greater pre-existing monetization risk. The findings show that platform governance can reallocate complementor effort and value capture across interconnected platforms: creators remain reliant on the dominant platform for discovery while shifting monetization toward an auxiliary channel governed by different rules.