Wait For Free: A Consumption-Decelerating Promotion for Serialized Digital Media

Promotions for digital goods have typically focused on enticing users to accelerate their consumption. Here, we investigate the effects of a novel consumption-decelerating promotion, “Wait For Free” (WFF), applied to serialized digital content – sequences of interconnected episodes – monetized via episode-level paywalls. Specifically, customers can sample early episodes of promoted series for free, and can continue to do so by waiting a pre-specified time; or, for those unwilling to wait, by paying. Analysis of viewership data from an online digital comics platform suggests that the WFF promotion can in fact boost paid readership for the promoted series at the platform level, net of cannibalization, when applied to an appropriate set of comics. Using a combinatorial genetic algorithm, we efficiently search through sets of series that maximize paid viewership when promoted, over time windows of different lengths, finding that the genres and overall popularity in the solution set can change based on planning horizon. Finally, to understand individual user-level promotional effects, we employ a proportional hazards framework to identify the degree of within-series inertia in content consumption and switching behavior across-series, and how these are affected by WFF.