Paper Type

Short

Paper Number

PACIS2025-1703

Description

Content creators are key players in the creator economy, leveraging social media platforms for income generation, personal branding, and creative expression. However, their work is increasingly shaped by psychological and structural pressures that may lead to burnout and decisions to reduce or cease platform use. Drawing on the Stressor-Strain-Outcome (SSO) framework, this study investigates the stressors contributing to content creators’ burnout and their intentions to discontinue social media. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on a corpus of publicly available creator-generated posts, followed by interpretive qualitative analysis, we identify three categories of stressors: technological, individual, and environmental. By mapping latent topic clusters to these stressor categories, the study offers empirical findings and extends the theoretical understanding of burnout and social media discontinuance in the context of the creator economy.

Comments

Social

Share

COinS
 
Jul 6th, 12:00 AM

The Hidden Cost of Social Media Fame: Stress, Burnout, and Discontinuance

Content creators are key players in the creator economy, leveraging social media platforms for income generation, personal branding, and creative expression. However, their work is increasingly shaped by psychological and structural pressures that may lead to burnout and decisions to reduce or cease platform use. Drawing on the Stressor-Strain-Outcome (SSO) framework, this study investigates the stressors contributing to content creators’ burnout and their intentions to discontinue social media. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on a corpus of publicly available creator-generated posts, followed by interpretive qualitative analysis, we identify three categories of stressors: technological, individual, and environmental. By mapping latent topic clusters to these stressor categories, the study offers empirical findings and extends the theoretical understanding of burnout and social media discontinuance in the context of the creator economy.