"I love the feeling of being on stage, but I become greedy": Exploring the impact of monetary incentives on live streamers’ social interactions and streaming content

Live streaming is an emergent social medium that allows remote interaction between the streamer and an audience of any size. Major live-streaming platforms in some Asian countries have a digital gift-giving feature that allows viewers to directly reward streamers during live sessions. Streamers can later exchange the digital gifts they have received for money, and this monetary incentive appears likely to influence how they interact with their viewers and generate live-streaming content. However, the precise nature and mechanisms of such impact have not previously been explored. Therefore, this qualitative study with 13 streamer participants examines how digital gifting influences streamers’ motivations and the nature of both the content that they generate and their social interactions with their audiences. It reports that the digital-gifting function serves as a major incentive for active streaming, but may also disincentivize some streamers from continuing to contribute, for reasons that will be explored. Moreover, the participants devised strategies for both content generation and social interaction with the specific objective of earning gifts from viewers: practices that, in some cases, appeared to limit the quality of their live-streaming content. It was also noted that the streamers tended to have constrained social relationships with their viewers, in part because such relationships were seen as unequal or one-sided due to gift-giving behavior. The paper concludes with a discussion of design considerations for the incorporation of gift-giving features into live-streaming platforms, and additional recommendations for future research and the design of such platforms.