If you raise the price of a fan subscription, the top creators actually end up streaming less often.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
When Fan Subscriptions Get Expensive: How Platform-initiated Price Changes Affect Creator Behavior and Viewer Spending
SSRN · 6403638
The Takeaway
Using a price hike in Turkey as a natural experiment, researchers found that higher subscription revenue led to a 9.6% drop in streaming frequency. Many creators appear to have 'income targets,' and once they reached those goals faster due to higher prices, they prioritized leisure over extra work.
From the abstract
Digital creator platforms increasingly rely on fan subscriptions as a creator-centric and recurring monetization channel, yet little is known about how platform-initiated pricing changes in fan subscriptions affect creator effort and viewer spending in environments with multiple coexisting revenue streams. We study Twitch's sudden subscription price increase in Turkey as a quasi-natural experiment. Using rich streamer-day panel data and a difference-indifferences design comparing Turkish streame