Are Exposure Bucks Worth It? Evidence from Instagram

Brands often use the promise of exposure to their large audiences to incentivize content contributions from artists and creators. This study quantifies the value of exposure for independent creators that supply content to brands’ social media pages. We leverage Instagram’s co-authorship feature introduced in 2021, which lets brands credit creators in shared posts, and gather data on all co-authored posts between 260 large beauty/clothing brands and small creators. We estimate changes in creators’ follower counts after the co-authorship treatment in a difference-in-differences analysis, and address post content endogeneity by matching treatment and control posts using post-level visual content embeddings recovered from a Large Language Model. We find that exposure to a brand’s audience increases a creator’s cumulative followers by 0.47%, or roughly one week’s worth of growth. Although larger brand audiences lead to more growth all else equal, larger brands tend to have less engaged followers and lower quality co-authored posts. This leads to stable treatment effects from co-authoring with brands that have between 0.7m and 8.6m followers. The top 10% of collaborations lead to average 2.1% follower growth for the creator. Our estimates are in line with the effect of online display ads obtained from the previous research.

*Please note that this is a joint work with Daniel Goetz from U of Toronto.