Gender Inequalities in Content Collaborations: Asymmetric Creator Synergy and Symmetric Audience Biases

TL;DR

The results engage with the larger literature on digital and online biases, highlighting how genre and affordances moderate gendered collaboration, the direction of inequality, and contributing a general framework to quantify synergy across collaborations.

Abstract

Content-creator collaborations are a widespread strategy for enhancing digital viewership and revenue. While existing research has explored the efficacy of collaborations, few have looked at inequities in collaborations, particularly from the perspective of the supply and demand of attention. Leveraging 42,376 videos and 6,117,441 comments from YouTube (across 150 channels and 3 games), this study examines gender inequality in collaborative environments. Utilizing Shapley value, a tool from cooperative game theory, results reveal dominant in-group collaborations based on in-game affordances. However, audience responses are aligned across games, reflecting symmetric biases across the gaming communities, with comments focusing more on peripherals than actual gameplay for women. We find supply-side asymmetries exist along with demand-side symmetries. Our results engage with the larger literature on digital and online biases, highlighting how genre and affordances moderate gendered collaboration, the direction of inequality, and contributing a general framework to quantify synergy across collaborations.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Percentage of Collaborations Over All Videos, by Collaboration Pair with Man-Man (Navy), Man-Woman (Light Blue), Woman-Man (Salmon), and Woman-Woman (Red).
• Figure 2: Percentage of Videos Where Channel A (Light Blue) or Channel B (Salmon) Has Greater Median Viewership.
• Figure 3: Closeness Centrality of Men (Light Blue) and Women (Orange) YouTubers in a) Valorant and b) Dead by Daylight.
• Figure 4: Mean Sentiment Measures of Gendered Collaborations in a) Valorant and b) Animal Crossing, by Collaboration Pair with Man-Man (Navy), Man-Woman (Light Blue), Woman-Man (Salmon), and Woman-Woman (Red).
• Figure 5: Topic Measures of Comment Discourse for a) Valorant and b) Animal Crossing, by Collaboration Pair with Man-Man (Blue) and Woman-Woman (Red).