Challenge Accepted: The Effects of Contest Participation on a User-Generated Content Community.

This article examines the effects of integrating firm-driven contests into established user-generated content (UGC) communities, focusing on the 3D printing platform Thingiverse. Using extensive data from 146,324 users and 589,093 designs over six years, the study finds that contest submissions receive significantly higher community reactions due to a "spotlight effect" and increased contestant effort. However, contest participation shifts users' future contributions away from general community content toward more contest-related submissions, resulting in an overall decline in total content volume. Additionally, contests encourage more exploratory and innovative content creation, suggesting that contests redirect user attention toward novel problem-solving domains. These findings offer nuanced insights for platform managers balancing content quantity and diversity, highlighting contests as tools to foster exploration but potentially at the expense of regular community engagement.