The Influences of Your Content Decisions: A Thought Starter
For the past few weeks I probably binged on half a year’s worth of content (pre-Covid-19 consumption pace) across most of the video, e-book and gaming platforms I’m subscribed to. This included eleven seasons across six television series on Netflix, Prime Video and iTunes (a range of sci-fi, documentaries, comedy-drama, anime and political spy thriller genres), two and a half full-length books on Kindle, a full “racing season” on Forza Horizon 4 on Xbox One, and a fifteen-chapter series on Quibi.
(If you haven’t heard of Quibi, do check it out. It’s fascinating, and confusing at the same time)
Not to mention I still had my daily dose of news, tech, and business podcasts, YouTube and Facebook Live videos on the happenings around the Coronavirus pandemic, and a few hours of actual productive tasks related to work or house chores spliced in between.
This is nothing to be proud of, of course, as it just shows how much idle time I’ve had during the lockdown. And while I came out in a weird daze of satisfaction and confusion, I had a burning curiosity I needed to look into: how in the world did I arrive towards my decisions to consume such an eclectic range of content?
I’m a firm believer that every decision we make in life is a consequence of something (more on that…at one point, when I decide to write about free will). “Cause and effect”, in the words of the Merovingian on Matrix: Reloaded when he debunks Morpheus insistence on freedom of choice. We don’t make decisions in a vacuum, and so it goes with what we decide to watch, listen to, read or play.
While there’s an infinitely complex set of factors that influence our decisions we probably will never fully understand. I do think we can generalize how we arrive to such decisions in a more narrow scope of content consumption.
I’d say this generalization is more of a hypothesis based on introspection, which probably needs a more formal and extensive user study if you’re a balls-to-the-wall content/performance/digital marketer.
The Funnel of Content Choices
First, let’s start off with by illustrating the destinations within the audience’s content discovery journey.
Content Universe — literally everything online
Platform — Where the content is housed, published and consumed, from social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, to On-Demand Streaming such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Audible, Disney+ and Quibi, to the publishers’ websites
Category/Genre or Publisher/Creator — Each platform has their own means of categorizing content. For OTT platforms as Netflix, iTunes and Prime Video, content tends to be categorized by “Genres” or “Topics”, while social media networks like Facebook and YouTube who rely on 3rd parties to publish content will have content posted under “Publishers” (i.e. media companies) or “Creators” (i.e. individuals whether online influencers or regular users)
Content — The individual pieces of content you consume
The audience goes through this funnel relatively seamlessly as they decide what to consume. I turn on my laptop and log in the internet to access the universe of content, then log into the Netflix platform, go to a category/genre, then click on an individual piece of content, whether a TV series episode or a movie.
External Factors: Platform Algorithms, Marketing and Word-of-Mouth
Next, we can map out the external factors that influence audiences’ choices.
Essentially, our decisions are externally impacted by:
Platform Algorithms — Depending on the platform the content is housed, algorithms generally determine what shows up on your feed which factors in:
- A user’s profile (demography and geography),
- the user’s online consumption behaviors inside and, sometimes, outside of the platform (e.g. content will be recommended from similar content they consume with from specific profiles or publishers)
- the user’s declared and presumed interests — “declared” being what they specifically mark on their profile, and “presumed” based on the types/genres/formats of content they consume
Marketing — The efforts of the platform, media publisher or content creator to promote their content, whether done within the platform, or via 3rd party platforms (i.e. search and social media marketing)
Word-of-Mouth — Recommendations based on advocacy from the people users interact with directly / actively (e.g. friends, family, colleagues, anyone they meet on the street), or indirectly / passively (e.g. recommendations heard from a podcast, article, video that are not paid for by advertisers)
Interestingly, all three factors could also actually influence each other, for example:
- Algorithms are tweaked by the marketing needs of the platform as well as users’ consumption behaviors. Netflix, for example, often has a ton of new original programming coming out monthly, what gets promoted on individual users’ feeds will vary based on the content they’ve shown interest in.
- Word-of-Mouth is sometimes influenced by marketing and/or algorithmic suggestions that worked so perfectly that the user becomes a strong advocate for the piece of content for him spread the word to her/his friends
- Marketing is also influenced by the aggregate consumption behaviors of a platform’s users (that were influenced by Algorithms and WoM) — For example, if a marquee original movie is not being consumed by users, a platform may opt to push out marketing for the movie to increase viewership.
Internal Factors: What’s Ingrained and What’s Happening at the Moment
In addition, there are also internal factors inherent to the user that influence their content decisions.
The factors can be divided into two categories:
Ingrained Factors
- Values and Beliefs inherent to the user that makes him inclined to consume a specific topic or genre of content. For example If a user is religious, he may not be interested in documentaries about atheism.
- Interests that the user may have consciously or unconsciously allowed to influence their decision. For example a sci-fi fan may already be inclined to the genre, hence he already has the tendency to select only sci-fi movies or tv shows
At the Moment Factors
- Objectives that’s currently driving the user’s decisions. For example, if a user has an inkling to bake that day, he actively searches and consumes Youtube tutorial videos on how to make bread.
- Mood or how the user is currently feeling at the moment. If one is feeling sad, he decides to choose uplifting, feel-good movies to watch
I purposely neglected to illustrate the sequence of how these factors come into the journey, because it varies per person, per circumstance, of course. They don’t always come in a particular order, and not all these factors may come into play in every content decision. It will a jumbled mess on paper, trust me I tried.
But at least it’s something of a barebones framework that professional content and digital marketers could use for their work, or for a highly-meticulous Netflix viewer to use to obsessively introspect about his own viewing habits.
Feel free to steal it, assuming it’s worth stealing.
Thoughts for the Future of Content Recommendation
I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling either paralyzed, confused, and sometimes dissatisfied amidst the infinite amount of content out there. What if in the near future, the platforms are able to figure out how to read into the internal factors that influence your content choices.
Maybe through a combination of brain wave detection, facial recognition analysis, and/or a more or less accurate “digital twin” of a user, platforms can just feed you what you really want to watch before you even know what you want.
Goodbye free will. The Merovingian would be smirking on the side.
