Cross-Platform Links: Blessing or Curse?

In the digital-content industry, platforms compete to attract users and earn advertising revenue from content consumption. Conventional wisdom suggests that platforms should restrict cross-platform links to avoid user loss. However, practices of several platforms, such as TikTok—where content creators can include links in their profiles to competing platforms like YouTube—seem to contradict this notion, facilitating users’ exploration of preferred content elsewhere. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic model to examine two competing platforms’ strategies regarding cross-platform links. We find that the equilibrium strategies are driven by two opposing effects. On one hand, the cross-platform link causes users with high degrees of misfit to be redirected to the rival platform, resulting in a consumption-loss effect. On the other hand, the cross-platform link motivates the creator to enhance content quality, which not only attracts more users but also helps them find preferred content through the link. This quality-enhancement effect benefits the platform by increasing consumption from users who remain on the platform. The trade-off between these two opposing effects depends critically on the misfit between users and content, as well as the average advertising revenue generated from content consumption (i.e., the advertising rate). Our analysis shows that, in the presence of a regular creator, when the unit misfit cost is high, both platforms allow cross-platform links in equilibrium. When both the unit misfit cost and the advertising rate are low, both platforms ban the link in equilibrium. When the unit misfit cost is low and the advertising rate is high, both allowing and banning the link can be possible equilibrium outcomes. Furthermore, we show that the cross-platform link benefits both the creator and users, and both platforms opting to ban cross-platform links creates a prisoner’s dilemma even in terms of their revenues, warranting the attention of platform regulators.