My Friend, the Content Creator: Consequences of Parasocial Relationships for Engagement in Emerging Social Media

Abstract

this study, as the moderating variable was operationalized as the degree to which viewers perceived a streamer's communication style to be more utilitarian than hedonic.Panel A of Figure 6 reveals that a spotlight test would yield a significant negative effect (p < .05) of content-focused communication on viewing when utilitarian-superior style is above approximately −0.85. For values below that point, the confidence band contains zero and thus content-focused communication has no impact on viewing. Accordingly, combined with a pronounced utilitarian style and even with a slightly pronounced hedonic style, content-focused communication undermines viewing.The effect of community-focused communication on donating, as according to the level of utilitarian-superior style, is depicted in Panel B of Figure 6. It shows that the negative impact of community-focused communication turns significant for values above approximately 0.10. This represents an actionable finding for streamers, as combining community-focused communication with a utilitarian style mitigates donating when utilitarian begins to outweigh hedonic style. This finding strengthens the decision to reject H5b, which predicted that a utilitarian-superior style would mitigate the negative effect of community-focused communication on donating.Finally, Panel C of Figure 6 reveals that a spotlight test would yield a p value greater than .05 for the positive effect of content-focused communication on donating for values of utilitarian-superior style above approximately −0.50. In other words, a streamer's communication style does not have to be entirely utilitarian for content-focused communication to demonstrate a positive effect on donating. In fact, a streamer's communications can be slightly hedonically superior and still be able to boost monetary outcomes.