The Economics of Commentary

Online commentary such as reaction videos, cultural analysis, livestreams, and personality-driven takes have become one of the dominant leisure goods consumed by Gen Z. What once served as a supplement to news or entertainment has become the entertainment itself. According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, over 70% of Gen Z respondents report regularly watching or engaging with online commentary content, highlighting its growing role in leisure consumption. 

On the supply side, rising profitability has fueled a rapid expansion of the industry. The global influencer marketing industry reached $32.55 billion in 2025, a 35.66% year-over-year increase from $24 billion in 2024. Podcast advertising revenues surpassed $2 billion in the US in 2024, growing 26.4% year-over-year. Live-streaming platforms like Twitch generated $1.8 billion in 2024. 

But what has driven the growth in revenue generated by commentary, and why is the industry likely to keep expanding? 

For consumers, online commentary functions as a low-priced leisure good that delivers high utility. Commentary is increasingly abundant, typically free to access, and can be consumed passively, lowering the time cost relative to other entertainment. For producers, commentary requires far lower fixed costs than traditional media formats such as film, television, or formal newsroom reporting, and paired with strong consumer demand, creates high potential returns which attract more creators to enter the market. Low costs and high returns make commentary a strong substitute for traditional media and help explain its rapid growth in consumption and production. 

Theory: How Consumption Patterns Shift

Classical microeconomics defines leisure as time spent in non-labour activities that generate utility. Individuals optimize, to maximize their utility, by allocating hours between labour (which earns income but reduces free time) and leisure (which generates utility but limits earnings). The allocation is determined by the budget and time constraints, along with the individual's preferences. 

Over the past decade, digital platforms and mobile technologies have reshaped leisure choices by sharply reducing the monetary and time costs of consumption. These technological shifts have not only lowered the cost of accessing media but have also enabled the production and distribution of new forms of low-cost commentary. On platforms such as Youtube, TikTok, and for most podcasts, commentary is free to consume, pushing its price effectively to zero. Additionally, commentary is designed for passive consumption whereby people can listen while commuting or doing other tasks which reduces its opportunity cost of time. 

As commentary is abundant, free, easy to access and compatible with other activities, standard consumer theory predicts substitution towards commentary. Leisure time tends to shift toward goods with lower relative prices when those goods still offer high marginal utility. Substitution effects help explain commentary’s rise not only as a product of cultural factors but as a predictable result of changing relative prices.

Demand: Why is Commentary Consumed

Gen Z’s consumption of commentary can be explained by more recent economic utility theories, social identity, and evolving patterns in leisure behavior. 

Hedonic utility models suggest that individuals maximize pleasure while minimizing costs, and commentary provides rapid emotional or humorous content with little cognitive effort or time investment. The American Time Use Survey finds that Gen Z’s leisure is highly intermittent and frequently combined with other activities, such as commuting, studying, or using multiple devices, compared to older cohorts. This consumption pattern helps explain why commentary attracts so much demand as it easily fills short, intermittent windows of free time and can be consumed while performing other tasks without requiring sustained attention. 

Commentary also behaves as a substitute good where as commentary becomes easier to access and more entertaining than traditional media or even social interaction, users substitute away from the “more costly” option. The theory is empirically supported by a 2023 Pew Research study finding over 60% of teens prefer creator commentary to traditional news sources. 

Additionally, commentary’s popularity is amplified by its function as a form of information preprocessing. Herbert Simon’s work on cognitive load suggests that when mental demands are high, individuals substitute towards goods that reduce “information-processing costs”. Commentary content reduces processing costs by simplifying the interpretation of complex events or cultural material. As a result, demand shifts towards commentary rather than the original content. 

Finally, Identity-based utility, drawing on the work of Akerlof & Kranton, helps explain the appeal of commentary even when its informational content is low. This utility theory describes how consumption choices reflect and shape how individuals see themselves. Gen Z uses commentary to affiliate with influential online personalities, signal aesthetic preferences, and form parasocial relationships, a phenomenon documented in emerging technology studies. Under this theory, the utility of commentary stems from identity expression and social alignment rather than information provision, which explains its strong demand even when informational content is low. 

Supply: Why is Commentary Supplied 

Classic supply theory states that when production costs, especially fixed and startup costs, are low, more producers can enter a market, thereby increasing supply. Commentary fits this theory. 

Commentary content requires minimal fixed costs, where creators can start with just a cell phone and free editing apps. Additionally, commentary’s low marginal costs, where each additional video or podcast episode requires little time, equipment, or specialized labor, means that the barriers to frequent production are extremely low. Minimal equipment requirements, rapid production cycles, and the lack of need for expensive sets or editing lead to increased supply. Commentary differs from other long-form or produced content on these platforms, such as scripted videos, reality-style challenges, or professional reviews, which are more involved and often require higher-quality production and equipment. These low production costs mean creators can enter the market more easily and produce at higher frequency, driving its increased supply. 

Additionally, according to the Law of supply, producers tend to enter markets with high expected earnings. Commentary offers strong ad retention rates, high watch time, and viral sharing potential, all of which increase anticipated revenue. Predictable, repeatable formats, such as commentary, also reduce production risk, raising expected returns per hour worked. High expected returns in the category encourage creators, even those who have not previously released commentary, to reallocate effort to commentary production due to its monetary incentives. 

Furthermore, platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok further amplify these incentives. The platforms use algorithmic systems that actively reward content with high audience retention, frequent posting, and strong engagement. commentary often is built around identifiable personalities and ongoing reactions to current events, which aligns closely with platform incentives. As the platforms optimize for interactive, personality-driven content, commentary becomes algorithmically advantaged, increasingly driving creators to shift towards this style of content.

The commentary market operates under monopolistic competition, characterized by many producers, low entry barriers, and differentiation based primarily on intangible qualities such as personality, style, and emotional tone. Creators compete by cultivating unique voices, humour, and perspectives, much as brands build identities rather than relying solely on informational content. 

The Constraint: Attention 

The economics of commentary builds the theory of attention economics, treating attention as a scarce resource. Commentary, by contrast, is abundant and inexpensive to produce, allowing supply to scale faster than available attention. The imbalance creates crowded markets in which creators must compete for attention. Algorithms on platforms such as Youtube, TikTok, and Twitch further amplify this dynamic by rewarding content that generates strong engagement, especially emotionally charged or polarizing reactions. As a result, private incentives for creators increasingly diverge from socially optimal outcomes, producing classic negative externalities in which strategies to maximize attention may degrade the overall quality of information. 

Conclusion

The growth of commentary as a leisure good goes beyond a cultural shift to the results of classical economic processes. Low production costs, minimal barriers to entry, and platform incentives have enabled rapid supply expansion. On the demand side, low time and monetary costs, as well as the ease of passive consumption, have increased the utility consumers derive from commentary, further accelerating its growth. 

Platforms reinforce these dynamics. As algorithms optimize for engagement, creators operate in a monopolistically competitive market where profitability depends on capturing and retaining attention. This creates strong incentives to produce more reactive content at a higher frequency, pushing supply to grow faster than the attention available. 

The competition for attention generates classic negative externalities, where, when creators adopt strategies to maximize their own visibility - such as producing more polarizing, emotionally charged commentary - they impose costs on the broader information environment. The result is a crowded, noisy market, where the quality of discourse and information declines even though each creator is acting rationally within their incentive structure. 

Recognizing these economic incentives raises a broader question: if the forces driving commentary’s expansion are at least partially structural rather than cultural, how should consumers and policymakers respond? Determining the “socially optimal” level of commentary is not straightforward, where any assessment depends on assumptions about the value of information quality, expression, and consumption. The question, then, becomes the extent to which these negative externalities justify policy intervention.