281 / 2024-04-24 09:33:58

Countermeasures to Account Sharing on Media Platforms

Media platform,Sharing

Media platforms are introducing various policies to crack down on illicit account sharing, but the impacts of these countermeasures are not well understood. We evaluate and compare commonly used countermeasures by a two-sided media platform whose source of revenue includes both paid subscriptions and advertising. Our analyses show that there is an upper limit to the extent of profit improvement that non-pecuniary countermeasures—countermeasures that do not alter the revenue and cost structures of the platform—can achieve, and we identify several non-pecuniary countermeasures that implement the optimal outcome, including the use of a free streaming cap and the downgrade of streaming quality for free riders, all of which are equivalent from the platform's perspective. We then analyze a pecuniary countermeasure—the family plan that Netflix introduced recently. We show that although optimal non-pecuniary countermeasures and the optimal family plan can both improve platform profit, they do not dominate one another. We characterize the conditions under which one is preferred to another. Implications for practitioners are discussed.