Incentivizing Engagement: Experimental Evidence on Journalist Performance Pay

763/2025 Ivan Balbuzanov, Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski, Emilia Tjernström

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.

Designing And Building Institutions