Abstract:
This paper examines how sudden government‐imposed content moderation shapes content creators’ behavior and platform dynamics in the live streaming markets of two competing platforms. For our empirical investigation, we leverage the bans of the popular live streaming platforms Twitch and Kick in Turkey in February 2024. This enables us to estimate a difference-in-differences (DiD) analytical framework, comparing the supply of and demand for content by Turkish streamers (the treatment group) versus a control group of unaffected European streamers from Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. The analysis highlights three primary findings: first, platform bans reduce content supply (airtime) and content demand (hours) watched, although with non-perfect compliance; second, the platform which got unbanned first (Kick) achieves a reverberating gain in content supply and demand after both platforms have been unbanned, likely because at the time of unbanning Kick, Twitch was still banned which took a toll on Twitch even after it got unbanned; third, we trace down the mechanism behind the post-ban proliferation of Kick by further investigating the treatment group of Turkish streamers. We show that this gain is partly explained by (i) streamers migrating from Twitch to Kick, (ii) Kick attracting entirely new streamers starting to supply content on Kick after the unbanning, and (iii) Kick successfully turning previous multi-homers (channels streaming on both Twitch and Kick) into single-homers (only streaming on Kick). The results contribute to existing literature by enhancing our understanding of the immediate effects of bans as well as of post-ban dynamics, carrying substantial implications for policymakers, streaming platforms, and streamers.
Dominik Gutt is a Professor of Business Information Systems at RWTH Aachen University where he holds the chair of Business Information Systems and Digital Transformation since October 2025. Previously, he worked at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam from September 2019 to September 2025 as an Assistant and Associate Professor. He obtained his PhD from Paderborn University in 2019.
He is doing research on topics related to the Economics of Information Systems. His main research interests lie in user-generated content (e.g., electronic word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer video streams), web3 (NFTs and DAOs), and the effects of AI usage (chatbots, GAI). His work has been accepted at peer-reviewed journals including Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly and presented at leading Information Systems and Economics conferences including the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute, the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE), the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), and Statistical Challenges in E-Commerce Research (SCECR), and the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS).
His research has been recognized with several awards (e.g., AIS Early Career Award, TARGION Research Award) and featured in popular national news outlets (TV, radio, news websites) as well as in research-focused and general interest podcasts (e.g., This IS Research). He is an active member of the academic community, particularly in Information Systems, where he serves as an Associate Editor for MIS Quarterly and Business & Information Systems Engineering. He also served as an ERB member for ISR and received the Reviewer of the Year 2023 Award from MIS Quarterly.
