The joint effects of novelty and familiarity on creativity adoption in content creation platforms

The rapid rise of content creation platforms in the digital age has provided new incubators for mass creativity, and also fundamentally reconfigured the production and consumption of creative works. For content creators seeking personal achievements on these platforms, how to produce works that are more likely to be adopted by platform users is a key concern. Based on optimal distinctiveness theory, this study draws on unobtrusive data of 174,053 posts from 2,450 content creators in a major Chinese content creation platform to explore the joint effects of novelty and familiarity of the creative works on creativity adoption. We constructed measurements of novelty and familiarity based on hashtags of the post, and conducted polynomial analysis and response surface analysis to test our hypotheses. Our findings complement existing creativity adoption research which mainly focus on the effects of novelty, and extend the explanatory power of optimal distinctiveness theory in the new context. We also offer practical guidance for both content creators and platform governors. Limitations and future directions are discussed.