Incentivizing Engagement: Experimental Evidence on Journalist Performance Pay

Ivan Balbuzanov, Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski and Tjernström, Emilia
Additional contact information
Ivan Balbuzanov: Department of Economics, University of Melbourne
Jared Gars: Food and Resource Economics Department, University of Florida
Mateusz Stalinski: University of Warwick and CAGE
Tjernström, Emilia: Macquarie University

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Digital platforms increasingly compensate content creators based on engagement metrics, yet the effects of these incentives remain poorly understood. We conducted a field experiment with a Kenyan news outlet to study how high-intensity performance incentives affect content production, quality, and journalist well-being in digital media. We randomly assigned writers to either pay-per-click (PPC) or piece-rate contracts. The PPC contract tripled per-article pageviews and increased daily pageviews by 107%, but reduced the number of published articles by 74%. While PPC writers earned more per article, their overall earnings fell, lowering the firm’s wage bill and increasing profits. However, these gains came at a cost: PPC writers shifted content production away from local news and towards attention-grabbing political stories. PPC writers also used less positive language in both headlines and article bodies. Our results show that engagement-based pay boosts reader traffic but caution that this may come at the cost of compromised coverage diversity, local news provision, and journalist well-being.

Keywords: performance pay; labor productivity; media engagement; field experiment JEL Classification: C93; J24; J33; L82; M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp763.2025.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:763

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().