Apostolos Filippas, Ph.D.

In the paper, “The Production and Consumption of Social Media,” Filippas and his coauthors studied user engagement to better understand how attention bartering shapes content production and consumption.

“It’s different from traditional media,” he said. “Not only can we consume [others’] content, now we receive some attention, stay on there more, see more ads, and [the platform] makes money,” Filippas said, adding that, for the purposes of this study, the researchers looked at user engagement on #EconTwitter, a Twitter community of professional and amateur users who tweet about economics.

The paper, which received the runner-up best paper award in Information Systems at the 2022 INFORMS conference, explored how Twitter users who have similar numbers of followers, content engagement, and notoriety form “clubs” and actively consume the content of members of the same club. It identified three types of users: low-status users, who have a small number of followers; mid-status users, who have a moderate number of followers; and high-status users, or those who have a high follower count and have reached an “elite” status.

Twitter users within the mid-range of followers were most likely to engage in attention bartering, forming large fractions of their online relationships based on mutually following others’ content. On the other hand, low-status users would like to barter but lack the opportunity to do so, while high-status users are more often sought out and have no incentive to barter.

To explain this phenomenon, Filippas used the example of a comedy open mic night. The comedians are not paid for the content they produce and instead barter for attention by listening to the jokes of their fellow performers in exchange for having an audience themselves. The club owner—like the operators of social media platforms—provides the meeting place for this exchange, profiting from the sale of food and drinks.

“Most aspiring comedians are not there to listen to others’ jokes, but mostly because they want somebody to hear their own jokes,” Filippas said. “Social media is about obtaining utility from consuming content, but also it’s about obtaining utility from receiving attention.”

Social media advertising comprises a multibillion-dollar industry, and that doesn’t include additional revenue from sponsorships, subscriptions, and e-commerce. Using this study’s findings about consumer behaviors, Filippas said that social media platforms and advertisers could potentially drive profits higher by adjusting or adding features that would keep users active on a site, and therefore, exposed to more ads.

“Everything is designed towards getting users to spend more time on social media and see more advertisements,” he said. “I think that it has been a conscious decision that some social media platforms have made to encourage attention bartering because as we show, the more attention you receive, the more active you are on social media.”