Who Watches Live Streaming in China? Examining Viewers’ Behaviors, Personality Traits, and Motivations

Abstract

With millions of viewers globally, live streaming is a new social media that can deliver video content in real time and with many social interaction functions. Our research aims to understand the personality traits and the motivations of active live streaming viewers as well as their user behaviors in the general population in China. Our results indicate that extraversion was negatively associated with live streaming use, while openness was positively associated. The main motivations to watch live streaming were social interaction, information gathering, and entertainment, and they were associated with different frequencies of use and genre selection. Financial tipping behavior was positively associated with social interaction. Furthermore, motivations mediated the effects of personality traits on live streaming use. People high in openness were more likely to be motivated to chat by information needs. Among extraverts, those who were more social watched fewer streams. We demonstrated that personality traits and motivations can jointly predict live streaming use. The current study not only provides the first evidence of live streaming use with personality traits and motivations but also expands the perspective on individual difference with the mediation analysis. Practically, the person-situation joint interpretation can give industry a clear indication on how to design personalized user experience for people with different personality traits and motivations.

How Live Streaming Features Impact Consumers’ Purchase Intention in the Context of Cross-Border E-Commerce? A Research Based on SOR Theory

“…Compared with domestic e-commerce, cross-border e-commerce platforms have higher information asymmetry and opportunism, which increase the overall perceived uncertainty of consumers (Yang and Shen, 2015). However, through live streaming, cross-border e-commerce demonstrates the use of products, displays different perspectives of products, and answers consumer questions in real time (Lu et al, 2018;Xu and Ye, 2020), having the characteristics of strong pertinence and low information loss, which can effectively reduce consumer perception of uncertainty. Based on this, this paper proposes the following research hypotheses: H1: The live streaming features can enhance consumers' overall perceived value in cross-border e-commerce platforms.…”

I give discounts, I share information, I interact with viewers: a predictive analysis on factors enhancing college students' purchase intention in a live-streaming shopping environment

“…At the same time, through the interaction live-streamers have with others via text-based dialogues in exchanging their thoughts about products and Figure 1 Conceptual model services, it can help shoppers to infer the popularity of products and whether they will purchase them (Xu and Ye, 2020;Sun et al, 2019;Wang and Wu, 2019). The importance of these factors is also seen in recent studies such as Xu and Ye (2020). They leverage aspects of interaction and aspects of professionalism as the stimuli that drive consumer behavior in live-streaming.…”

“…College students were selected as the research participants for three main reasons. First, college students are savvier and more open to this new way of shopping (Xu and Ye, 2020). Second, the China Internet Network Information Center, whose 2019 report shows that the most significant internet users are students (CNNIC, 2019).…”

Understanding Virtual Gifting in Live Streaming by the Theory of Planned Behavior

“…So, we hypothesize the following: H1: attitude towards virtual gifting in live streaming is positively associated with virtual gifting intention Evidence suggests that entertainment and social networking motivate people to use live streaming and are positively associated with use frequency and virtual gifting behavior [22,29]. Experienced enjoyment in live streaming as the flow can drive consumption of virtual gifts (B.…”

“…Hilvert-Bruce and colleagues [21] investigated Twitch live streaming viewer engagement through surveys and found that social interaction and sense of community are associated with financial supporting for streamers through subscription and donation. A study examining Chinese live streaming viewer behaviors suggested that virtual gifting is motivated by social networking [22]. Virtual gifting is not directly related with viewing frequency.…”