MsYanting He

Topics: Digital Paltforms, Creator Economy, Influencer Marketing

Methods: Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Generative AI

Publications

• Frontiers: How Much Influencer Marketing is Undisclosed? Evidence from Twitter (with Daniel Ershov and Stephan Seiler)  
  • Marketing Science, 2025, 44(3), pp 505-515  (Authors listed in alphabetical order.)
  • Developed from Yanting's first-year paper
  • Abstract: We quantify the prevalence of undisclosed influencer posts on Twitter across a large set of brands based on a unique data set of over 100 million posts. We develop a novel method to detect undisclosed influencer posts and find that 96% of influencer posts are not disclosed as such. Despite stronger enforcement of disclosure regulations, the share of undisclosed posts decreases only slightly over time. Compared to disclosed posts, undisclosed posts tend to be associated with younger brands with a large Twitter following and are posted from smaller accounts that generate higher engagement per follower.

Selected Working Papers

• Private Messaging in the Creator Economy (primary author, with Andreas Lanz)
  • Yanting's Job Market Paper 
  • Abstract: The creator economy faces intensifying competition for audience attention, a challenge amplified by algorithmic mediation that tends to favor established creators, leaving emerging ones at a disadvantage. While private messaging (PM), by circumventing algorithmic gatekeeping, offers an alternative pathway for such creators to acquire and retain audiences, many platforms have historically de-prioritized this feature, uncertain of its role and value—potentially concerned by diverting attention from public communication, cannibalizing likes, comments, and reposts. Partnering with the world’s largest user-generated platform in the audio domain, this paper provides the first large-scale causal evidence on how private communication shapes key creator outcomes. Given the quasi-experimental setting created by the sequential rollout of the PM feature, we leverage a future-adopter, staggered difference-in-differences design. We find that PM adoption significantly improves key creator outcomes: visibility (+9.2%), consumption (+9.5%), engagement (+2 to +7%), and follower growth (+6.5%). Emerging creators experience larger gains in visibility, consumption, and productivity—and these benefits scale with PM usage consistency, suggesting PM helps solve the cold-start problem, despite the algorithm-driven environment. Contrary to platform concerns, we find no evidence of cannibalization; private and public communication are reinforcing, rather than competitive. Furthermore, PM adoption increases creator productivity, hence private communication generates value on both sides of the market: it benefits creators individually, while simultaneously expanding the platform’s content supply to audiences.