Social media platforms often use tiered status systems to categorize influencers into different tiers based on their follower count. However, few studies have examined the effects of these follower-based status systems on influencers’ content-creation behaviors. This study addresses this gap using data from a leading Chinese social media platform. We explore the platform’s influencer status-assignment rule that grants “mid-tier” status to influencers with more than 50,000 but less than 500,000 followers; specifically, we estimate the impacts of gaining mid-tier status on influencers’ content creation using a regression discontinuity (RD) approach. The results show that obtaining mid-tier status positively impacts the quantity of sponsored but not organic content. However, status change does not affect the quality (measured through user engagement) of sponsored or organic content. Further analysis reveals that the positive effect on sponsored content quantity operates through multi-channel networks (MCNs), which selectively allocate sponsorship opportunities based on influencers’ follower-based status.
Zhong et al. (Sun,) studied this question.