Investigating Churn in Online Wellness Programs : Evidence from a U.S. Online Social Network

Online wellness and fitness platforms are increasingly utilizing social support in their wellness programs to motivate healthy activities and improve user engagement. However, many wellness programs suffer from high churn rates that discount their expected efficacy. This introduces negative social influence that may lead to a churn contagion and amplify churn speed and scale. Hence, a need arises to understand why users churn wellness programs and how social contagion contributes to the churns. Leveraging the exercise challenge setting, exercise field data, and a large social network on a renowned U.S. online fitness platform, we investigate the effect of peers' tendency to churn exercise challenges on ego's churn likelihood. To achieve the research goal, we employ an instrumental variable framework, using the exogenous variation of peers' weather in locations that differ from the ego's location as instruments. The framework untangles the endogeneity of the estimated effect using variations created by peers' weather as a shock to the ego's churn. We measure churn as a decision the ego makes after being inactive for one to two weeks and define peers as the ones the ego follows on the platform. We find that exercise challenge churn is socially contagious and demonstrates a complex contagion effect. Interestingly, our analyses reveal that the social contagion of churn diffuses from the sub-central or peripheral egos who have fewer friends in the social network to central egos who have more friends in the social network. Such churn contagion is mostly confined to low-density network communities with members who are poorly connected with one another. Our findings have important implications for designing intervention plans to stop wellness program churn based on social contagion