Abstract:

User generated content (UGC) is becoming a dominating way for people to communicate and share with each other on social platforms. For platform providers, a good UGC performance can attract more advertisers and directly influence their revenue. Therefore, how to encourage people to contribute content becomes a problem of interest. However, the underlying motivation on user generated content is still not well understood. Therefore, we propose in this paper a more comprehensive utility framework. Combining with previous intrinsic and image-related utility, we propose an interaction utility concept to describe the utility that users derive from interacting with their friends. Then incorporating interaction utility is our first contribution in this paper. As our second contribution, we exert a time budget constraint in our utility framework and this enables us to evaluate the tradeoff between generating and consuming content. Finally, a Sina Weibo dataset is used for illustration.

Key words: Social Networks, Interaction Utility, User Generated Content, Negative Binomial Regression