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, we 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 do so by waiting a pre-specified time; or for those unwilling to wait, by paying. WFF can draw users to start viewing a promoted series, and generate revenue through two sources: impatient users opting to pay to consume the next episode immediately; and additional users continuing through to paid-only episodes at the end. We analyze large-scale viewership data from a platform that enacted WFF for digital comics. A comic-level Difference-in-Differences (DiD) 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 inter-comic 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.