2022/04/22 by Simon Bründl, Christian Matt, Thomas Hess +2
Social Sciences · #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Impact of Technology on Adolescents
paper · doi:10.1080/0960085x.2022.2062468
openalex publication_date 2022/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
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.