Monetizing User-Generated Content in FinTech: An Empirical Study of a Social Investing Site

Despite reports that user-generated content (UGC) is dominating the Internet, the contributors of UGC are rarely compensated for their creative works. Enabled by a unique dataset from a large social investing site in China, we conduct an empirical study to examine the UGC monetization in terms of its influence, the timing of a contributor’s adoption and the impact from online social activities. Our analyses utilize multiple methods (time-series modeling, logit modeling and Bayesian statistical analysis). Our contributions include: 1) This study is the first to unveil the impact of UGC monetization on the platform and contributors with a horizontal comparison of different monetization methods; 2) We make a pioneering effort to analyze how contributors’ online social efforts (i.e., the micro-celebrity tactics) facilitate monetization; 3) Our results advance the financial information literature by showing how UGC readers seek information; 4) Our results inform practitioners how to time the decision of monetization