Why monetisation of platforms like Spotify and Goodreads needs a diversity stress-test

When Shrabastee Banerjee tracked Goodreads’ decision to charge authors up to $599 for a once-free giveaway, participation, diversity and reader satisfaction plummeted, exposing how flat fees quietly exclude small and minority producers.

The creator economy is forecast to hit $500 billion by 2028, but only if the long tail of small and minority creators can still afford to play. My new study of Goodreads’ book-giveaway program (co-authored with colleagues at Bocconi University, published in the leading business journal Management Science), offers a cautionary tale: when a platform slaps on a seemingly modest paywall, diversity suffers and the market tilts toward incumbents.

Within weeks of the paywall introduction, monthly campaigns collapsed from about 3000 to 1000 (roughly a two-thirds drop), while the share of Big Five publishers more than doubled from 12% to 30%. The diversity of genres represented fell by over one standard deviation, and reader engagement became “louder but harsher”: books drew ten extra reviews yet lost 0.05–0.08 stars on average.

In other words, a flat fee meant to bolster revenue ended up taxing precisely the creators who made the marketplace vibrant in the first place, making it harder for consumers to find something they liked.

All across the world, producers of creative goods are encountering new costs of entry. Patreon will soon move new creators onto a single pricing tier, increasing its take rate to 10% . Meanwhile, Spotify now withholds royalties from tracks that fail to reach 1,000 yearly streams, a change that doesn’t impose a fee per se, but redirects revenue away from niche and independent artists.

Each move may be justifiable in isolation: to curb spam, raise quality, or encourage turnover. But together, they reflect a broader shift in platform design. Flat fees, however small, tend to hit the long tail hardest, nudging out precisely the creators and sellers who bring variety, experimentation, and cultural value to the system.

So what would a more deliberate approach look like? First, platforms should model price elasticity at the segment level, since a seemingly small flat fee may barely register for a power seller but can sink an independent creator. Second, diversity itself should be tracked as a core KPI. In our study, Shannon entropy dropped by 1.13 standard deviations after the fee.

Similar metrics could be used to monitor product diversity, creator mix, or, in the case of movies, music and books, genre balance across time. Third, if promotion becomes pay-to-play, so exposure still reaches the right micro-audiences and consumer satisfaction doesn’t tank. And finally, platforms should explore sliding-scale models or fee waivers for underrepresented or early-stage creators, as investment in a healthier ecosystem.

As European regulators begin enforcing the Digital Markets Act, these findings offer a timely reminder: algorithmic fairness matters, but so does who gets priced out before the algorithm even sees them. The question isn’t whether fees are justified, but whether their design quietly edits out the very participants who make a platform worth returning to. If monetisation comes at the cost of diversity, discovery, and trust, it may not be worth the short-term gain.