Market Competition as a Moderator of the Effect of Social Signals on Viewership in Video-Sharing Platforms

In this paper, we use a panel dataset of 15988 videos from 6826 online video producers across 17 markets on a large video-sharing platform to examine the impact of social signals on video viewership, with a particular focus on investigating the moderating role of the market competi-tion. This study reports that social presence and endorsement are critical social signals that viewers use to predict viewing experience and video content quality. Notably, the results find strong evidence that the effectiveness of these social signals on video viewership is substantially contingent on the platform's market competition conditions at the producer and product level. More specifically, in highly (+1SD) competitive markets at the product level, social presence and social endorsement have a 2.92% and 3.46% less positive impact on video viewership, respec-tively, compared to low (-1SD) competitive markets. On the other hand, markets with high (+1SD) concentration, where there is a lack of competition at the producer level, increase the impact of these signals on video viewership by 7.55% and 6.22%, respectively, compared to markets with low (-1SD) concentration.