Understanding the impacts of user- and marketer- generated content on free digital content consumption

Abstract The literature has shown that user-generated content (UGC) and marketer-generated content (MGC) simultaneously influence consumers' decision-making process. Yet it is unclear how UGC and MGC jointly affect the overall market reaction, when digital content is freely available to all consumers. To fill the gap, we integrate the UGC and MGC literature and research of determinants of physical exercise to develop a comprehensive conceptual model. Using a dataset collected from a leading online fitness brand, we find that both UGC and MGC affect a free fitness video's incremental view count. We further categorize UGC into three dimensions, where favorability represents the normative dimension, various textual features represent the informational dimension, and reply-density of the self-organized reviewer community represents the social dimension. While both normative and social UGC are positively associated with online fitness videos' view count increase, the impact of informational UGC is insignificant. More importantly, product features, such as exercise intensity, moderate the impacts of UGC and MGC on free digital content consumption. When facing strenuous exercises, the consumer group relies more on peer users and less on marketers to make their content consumption decisions. The findings provide insightful implications to understand how consumers decide their engagement with free digital content delivered via social media channels.