Motivating User-generated Content Producers

Social media websites(e.g.YY live,Yingke Live,Douyu Live,XimalayaFM,Tencent Literature,etc)provides people a platform to share self-produced(textual and visual)media online.These shared media attracts millions of online viewers,and both websites and producers benefits.Websites profit from advertisement sale,viewer subscription,merchandize sales,etc.Producer obtains in sharing up to some limit.The shared media content bing the sole product,the websites' profit heavily relies on producer's effort in creation activities,therefore websites needs to motivate them to invest effort in media creation and refrain them from activities that do not align with websites' interests.One commonly used tool by websites is incentive contracts;and two types of incentive compensation contracts are widely observed in real life:1)salary and commission compensation that provides both insurance and incentives,and 2)commission-only compensation that provides only incentives.We examine the ralationship between a risk-neutral live UGC website and risk-averse media producers in a principal-agent framework.We show how the website should adjust the compensation plan to the producer's risk aversion,randomness of return and the amount of pleasure drained form broadcasting;as more media producers treat live UGC as an important career path,we suggest rules that the website should obey to better adjust to the change.Wefurther analyze how non-monetary terms could be incorporated into the compensation plan;it is shown that adding non-monetary does not give producers extra incentives;however,it doer provide increase the producers' utility.The websites slso needs to refrain the producers from activities that are not directly related to websites' revenue.Given a commission rate we identify which activities are desirable for the website;and which undesirable activities could be allowed(but would be discarded by the producers)and which should be banned under different compensation plan.These results shed a light on why some websites does not voluntarily ban illegal contents even though they do not profit from that,and why some website choose not to pay its producers.