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Engagement as Infrastructure: A Conceptual Model of Community Building and Long-Term Sustainability for Digital Content Channels

Kelechi Chantel Egwuatu Anyanwu

Abstract

Digital content channels, including video platforms, podcasts, newsletters, and creator led communities, present a persistent puzzle. Many achieve rapid early reach yet fail to endure, while others sustain participation and production across years despite comparatively modest scale. Prevailing accounts treat engagement as an outcome variable, a metric of attention to be maximized, or a marketing construct subordinate to reach and conversion. This paper advances an alternative conceptualization: engagement as infrastructure. Drawing on infrastructure studies, social capital theory, and commons governance scholarship, it argues that engagement is best understood not as a momentary signal but as the relational, technical, normative, and economic substrate that allows a channel to persist. The paper develops a layered conceptual model in which engagement infrastructure comprises four interdependent layers and is sustained through ongoing maintenance and repair rather than through episodic growth. It theorizes long term sustainability as a composite of continuity, resilience, regeneration, and economic viability, and it derives seven propositions linking infrastructural depth, distributed relational ties, maintenance labor, platform dependency, reciprocity, commons governance, and onboarding to sustainability outcomes. The model reframes virality as a stress on infrastructure rather than a measure of health, repositions invisible maintenance labor as a central activity, and clarifies why platform native engagement can simultaneously accelerate growth and erode durability. Implications for creators, platform designers, and researchers are discussed, and an agenda for empirical validation is outlined.

Keywords

audience engagementdigital content channelscreator economyonline communityinfrastructuresustainabilitysocial capitalcommons governance

References

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