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

Promotions for digital goods have typically focused on enticing users to hasten their consumption. Here, the authors investigate a novel deceleration-incentivizing promotional policy, “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 watch for free by waiting a prespecified time; those unwilling to wait can pay to view episodes right away. WFF can draw users to start viewing a promoted series, and it generates revenue through two sources: impatient users opting to pay to consume the next episode immediately, and additional users continuing through the free episodes to watch paid-only episodes at the end. The authors analyze large-scale viewership data from a platform that enacted WFF for digital comics. A comic-level difference-in-differences analysis provides robust evidence that WFF boosts paid viewership for the promoted series, and the degree of lift varies by user type and over time. A more granular episode-level analysis incorporating intercomic spillovers and promotional lift heterogeneity suggests that WFF can boost net-of-cannibalization revenue at the platform level: Specifically, the model-optimized set of promoted comics performs roughly 18% better than the firm-enacted one and 25% better than the no-promotion baseline; furthermore, WFF and paid-only episodes each receive nontrivial degrees of lift, 70% and 59% respectively.