Research Insight | How Community Gifting on Twitch Affects User Engagement
Live streaming has emerged as a dominant form of social media that attracts millions of users worldwide, with the Twitch platform leading the way. As this industry continues to grow exponentially, it becomes increasingly important to understand and optimize user engagement for advertising revenue. The incorporation of community engagement features such as live chat, emoticons, and gifting systems has shown promise in enhancing user interaction and loyalty. This study analyzes users’ engagement after receiving a gift. Results indicate that, relative to nonrecipients within a five-minute window of a gifting event, community gift recipients exhibit a 69% chance of directing an additional message toward their peers, a 35% chance of directing an additional message toward the streamer, and a 5% chance of gifting an incremental subscription to the community. However, there is no observable increase in tipping behavior toward the streamer, suggesting a nuanced response to different forms of engagement incentives.
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What You Need to Know
- Encourage community gifting on live streaming platforms like Twitch to boost user engagement, as recipients show increased social interaction such as messaging peers and streamers after receiving a gift.
- Recognize the importance of timing and context in community gifting initiatives, as the effectiveness of recipient engagement may vary based on prior chat volume and dynamics.
- Recipients’ gifting behavior is less frequent when there are more gifting events prior to the focal community gift.
Abstract
Community gifting, the phenomenon of donating digital goods to peers without selecting specific recipients, is one of live streaming’s key social technologies for engaging online communities. In this study, the authors investigate the causal relationship between receiving a community gift and the recipient’s subsequent social and monetary engagement behaviors by exploiting the randomization of recipient assignment on a popular live streaming platform, Twitch. They find that, relative to nonrecipients within a five-minute window of a community gifting event, community gift recipients exhibit a 69% chance of directing an additional message toward their peers, a 35% chance of directing an additional message toward the streamer, and a 5% chance of gifting an incremental subscription to the community. However, recipients are no more likely to tip the streamer. The authors apply computational linguistics methods to illustrate that recipients’ increased social engagement is accompanied by elevated sentiment and an increased likelihood of joining existing conversations. Finally, a series of moderator analyses show that recipients’ gifting behavior is less frequent when there are more gifting events prior to the focal community gift, enabling the recipient to hide. Moreover, the social engagement effect of receiving a community gift is greater when prior chatter is more voluminous and discontinuous, that is, when it is easier for the recipient to jump into the chat. We conclude that the spillovers to social engagement are more important than those to financial reciprocity given the positive feedback loop implied by our moderator analysis. Our results reveal how and when community gifting impacts audience engagement.
Alexander Chaudhry, Yang Wang, and Erya Ouyang, “Community Gifting and Recipients’ Engagement with Peers and Influencers: Evidence from Natural Experiments on Twitch,” Journal of Interactive Marketing. doi:10.1177/10949968241257891.