Navigating the Influencer Marketplace: Long-Tail Effects and Content Strategies

The prevalence of consumer-generated content on social media platforms has successfully attracted brands to collaborate. Although social media platforms have started to develop open-access marketplaces, such as BrandConnect on YouTube, to facilitate connections between brands and influencers, it is unclear how a marketplace entry like this will impact influencers and their content generation. In this study, we seek to fill this gap by exploring an exogenous marketplace launch on a popular social media network. Our findings show that this marketplace launch results in heterogeneous benefits of the sponsorships among influencers of varying fan sizes. Specifically, medium-tier influencers (e.g., micro- and nano-influencers) receive more sponsorship after the marketplace’s entry compared with top-tier influencers because of reduced search costs and alleviated quality uncertainty facilitated by the centralized search tool. Interestingly, we also discover strategic content creation behaviors among these medium-tier influencers in response to increased sponsored collaborations; they proactively post more organic content and further diversify their topics, aiming to maintain their organic post ratio and mitigate potential reputation damage. Our findings provide valuable implications for influencer marketplaces and offer insights for both the platform and its stakeholders.

History: Bin Gu, Senior Editor; Hong Xu, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2023.0581.