The Structure and Traffic Monetization of Creator Affective Networks: The Mediating Role of Emotional Connection in Monetization Efficiency

Abstract

The creator economy enables individuals to convert attention and community participation into advertising, sponsorship, subscription, tipping, affiliate, and product revenue. Yet creators with similar traffic often achieve different commercial outcomes, indicating that audience size alone cannot explain monetization efficiency. This paper develops a theoretical model in which creator affective network structure influences monetization through emotional connection. Affective networks are relational systems formed through repeated interaction, trust, identification, belonging, and parasocial closeness. Their structural properties include size, centrality, density, reciprocity, tie strength, clustering, and community cohesion. The paper argues that these properties create economic value only when they strengthen emotional connection, which then supports engagement, trust-based conversion, retention, and cross-product purchasing. Platform affordances, creator authenticity, content type, commercial intensity, audience heterogeneity, and creator–product fit are proposed as boundary conditions. The framework shifts analysis from traffic volume to relational efficiency and integrates social-network, parasocial-interaction, influencer-marketing, and relationship-marketing research.