Felipe Caro, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Felipe Caro, UCLA Anderson School of Management
Managing Online Content to Build a Follower Base
Managing Online Content to Build a Follower Base
Content providers typically manage a dual objective of
generating interest for current followers and at the same time reaching out to
new audiences that may become repeat visitors. The pace at which content is
created must thus take into account how much it contributes to maintain the
follower base. We formulate a simple model to study follower base build-up
dynamics under the assumption that the attractiveness of past content decays
over time. Using stochastic dynamic programming we develop heuristics for content
release and an upper bound to assess performance. We then apply our model to
the case of blogs: we analyze four blogs and their daily traffic for over 3
years. Our findings show that adjusting posting frequency to the optimum can
raise total traffic levels by generating a larger follower base.