Content (post, comment, blog, wiki, photo, video, etc.) production and subsequent consumption is a key part of the social web experience. Every second, on average, several thousand tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to several hundred million tweets per day and several hundred billion tweets per year. The content generation stats are in similar scale for other massive social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (visit Internet Live Stats for more such stats). We continue to witness the post-Web 2.0 era in the light of these social media platforms, where content production and consumption are the core processes that keep the platforms alive by serving nowness in the social web experience.

While content production and consumption are core processes that drive the social media platforms, our understanding of these processes and their relationship is yet limited. For example–What factors drive the production and consumption processes in a social media platform? Is it simply user participation, implying participation of more users lead to more production and consumption? Given that the users have limited time and they are distributing their time across production and consumption activities (e.g., In Facebook, a user distributes daily time between writing own posts and comments, and reading posts and comments from friends), what can be inferred about the relationship between production and consumption? Further, if users are investing most of their time in consumption activities (say reading posts and comments), or conversely, in production activities (say generating posts and comments), how does it affect the platform's sustainability, specifically in terms of future production and consumption?

To date, sustainability of social media platforms has been studied mainly from the perspective of user growth. These studies, however, only concentrate on the interaction between users, pay little or no attention to the interaction between users and content, and therefore, can not reveal insights regarding content production and consumption. There is a recent body of empirical studies that analyze patterns of user content production to reveal useful insights. However, even with these production-specific insights, there is a gap in understanding the factors of production and consumption, and their relationship. What is missing from the picture is explanatory models that clearly establish the relationship between production (or consumption) and associated factors. Developing such models is important for understanding the content production and consumption processes, predicting future production and consumption, and identifying platforms that will sustain for a long period of time.