Content Strategy and Creator Growth: The Role of Secondary Channels in Platform-Based Expansion

In my thesis, I examine how YouTube creators strategically expand their content portfolios by launching secondary channels. While many creators start with a single, focused channel, they often diversify their content or target new audiences through additional channels. This raises key questions: When and why do creators pursue such expansion—and how does it affect their overall performance? To investigate this, I construct a weekly panel dataset of German gaming YouTubers, capturing content uploads, performance metrics, and detailed metadata for both main and secondary channels. I explore which factors—such as content diversity, upload patterns, and thematic consistency—are associated with the decision to launch a secondary channel, and how these choices influence the creator’s ecosystem-level outcomes, particularly in terms of total viewership. While building on research in brand development, channel expansion, and product line extensions, my study adapts these concepts to the unique context of individual content creators, who face different incentives and constraints compared to firms. By focusing on how creators manage exploration and exploitation in their channel strategies, this thesis aims to offer new insights into content growth, visibility, and strategic decision-making in algorithm-driven platform environments.