How synchronous participation affects the willingness to subscribe to social live streaming services: the role of co-Interactive behavior on Twitch

ABSTRACT

Social computing has transformed the content industry. Content providers have changed from providing merely content to offering social content experiences that allow users not only to passively consume content but also to actively participate. As the latest development, social live streaming services (SLSS) have emerged that enable so-called co-interactive behaviour, i.e., the live interplay between users while co-experiencing content. Yet, it remains unclear how co-interactive behaviour affects the monetisation of social live content. Based on a data set of 868,940 users from 59 gaming channels of the freemium-based SLSS Twitch, we empirically show that co-interactive behaviour has a stronger effect on users’ willingness to subscribe (WTS) than passive and active behaviour. Since we find that a user’s reciprocated interactions also directly increase other users’ WTS, our results call for dismantling the current dichotomy of user participation and social influences in IS research. We suggest a social-experiential perspective that integrates social influences as an inherent part of users’ participation experiences. This novel interactive second-person perspective contributes to research on user engagement and value capture on social content platforms, and it allows SLSS providers to obtain a more precise picture of user value to better develop or adapt their monetisation strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-interactive behaviour
• Twitch
• willingness to subscribe
• user participation
• social live streaming services
• freemium

Acknowledgement

A previous version of this paper was presented at HICSS 2018. The authors want to thank the conference attendees for their valuable feedback. The authors also want to thank Virpi Kristiina Tuunainen as Senior Editor and the entire review team for their constructive feedback and excellent guidance throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.