When or What? Understanding Consumer Engagement on Digital Platforms
This research addresses the challenge for marketers, platform managers, and content creators in optimizing audience engagement strategies, though it is incremental as it builds on prior studies by shifting focus from content features to timing.
The study tackled the problem of what drives consumer engagement on digital platforms by analyzing TED Talks, finding that timing has a stronger influence than thematic content, with mismatches between producer offerings and consumer preferences identified.
Understanding what drives popularity is critical in today's digital service economy, where content creators compete for consumer attention. Prior studies have primarily emphasized the role of content features, yet creators often misjudge what audiences actually value. This study applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling to a large corpus of TED Talks, treating the platform as a case of digital service provision in which creators (speakers) and consumers (audiences) interact. By comparing the thematic supply of creators with the demand expressed in audience engagement, we identify persistent mismatches between producer offerings and consumer preferences. Our longitudinal analysis further reveals that temporal dynamics exert a stronger influence on consumer engagement than thematic content, suggesting that when content is delivered may matter more than what is delivered. These findings challenge the dominant assumption that content features are the primary drivers of popularity and highlight the importance of timing and contextual factors in shaping consumer responses. The results provide new insights into consumer attention dynamics on digital platforms and carry practical implications for marketers, platform managers, and content creators seeking to optimize audience engagement strategies.