The Effect of Personalized Content in Media Entertainment on Engagement with the Domain.

This article investigates how consuming personalized entertainment content—defined as content perceived to be tailored to an individual's tastes—affects consumers' intent to discuss the broader entertainment domain, such as music or short-form videos. Across eleven experiments involving platforms like Spotify and TikTok, the research finds that personalized content increases discussion intent among individuals who weakly identify with the domain by enhancing their enjoyment, but decreases discussion intent among strong identifiers by diminishing their confidence in domain knowledge. The study highlights that strong identifiers prioritize demonstrating expertise in discussions and thus may avoid conversations when their confidence is lowered, whereas weak identifiers focus more on enjoyment and are encouraged to engage in discussions. These findings have implications for content creators and platforms aiming to sustain user engagement, suggesting the need to address the differing motivations of strong and weak domain identifiers.