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Despite the burgeoning popularity of virtual gifting in live streaming, research lacks an in-depth understanding of the drivers behind this behavior. Using para-social relationship (PSR), this study aims to capture viewers’ lively social feelings toward the streamer as the key factor leading to the purchase behavior of virtual gifts. It also aims to establish a theoretical link between PSR and viewers’ holistic experience in live streaming as captured by cognitive absorption and aims to investigates the role of technological features (i.e. viewer–streamer and viewer–viewer interactivity, streamer-level and viewer-level deep profiling and design aesthetics) in shaping viewers’ experience.

Based on 433 survey responses, this study employs a combination of structural equation modeling and neural networks to offer valuable insights into the relationships between the technological environment, viewer experience and viewer behavior.

Our results highlight the salience of PSR in promoting the purchase of virtual gifts through cognitive absorption and the importance of the technological environment in eliciting the viewer experience. This study sheds light on the development of PSR in a technological environment and its relationship with cognitive absorption.

By applying PSR to conceptualize viewers’ perceived connection with the streamer, this study extends the research on purchase behavior in the non-shopping context by providing an enlightened understanding of virtual gift purchase behavior in live streaming. Moreover, by theoretically linking PSR with cognitive absorption, virtual gift purchase and technological features of live streaming, it enriches the theory of PSR and bridges the gap between the design practice of supporting the IT infrastructure of live streaming and research.

Purpose: This study aims to identify communication speech acts and transaction terms in online stores (Olshop) during live streaming on Facebook amid the COVID-19 pandemic and to understand communication patterns between sellers and buyers when shopping on Facebook live streaming in Indonesia.

The Need for Research: This research is motivated by the skill gap arising from increasing buying and selling transactions through live streaming on Facebook. Cultural and demographic shifts, along with the widespread availability of modern technologies and marketing 2.0 have resulted in the global population adopting social media at rates far beyond our use of the Internet, making a compelling case by example and analogy that social media has the potential to level the playing field and is effective in reaching their target market.

Methodology: The type of research is descriptive-qualitative using corpus data instruments. The data collection technique in this study was carried out by reading and observing the data and listening to speeches about buying and selling women’s equipment from various online stores on Facebook. Then select and sort the data designated as forms, strategies, and functions of speech acts in buying and selling transactions during live streaming on Facebook. The data analysis technique has three steps: (1) reducing the amount of data; (2) presenting the data; and (3) concluding.

Findings: The results show that there are four types of speech acts between sellers and buyers in the live-streaming online shop on Facebook, namely, assertive, directive, expressive, and commissive speech acts.

The boom in live streaming has intensified competition among streamers for viewers' gifts, which makes it meaningful to study the factors that affect the viewers’ gifting behavior. Given the emotional attachment between streamers and viewers, the authors set out to elucidate a new driver on viewer gifting: expressions of the streamer. This research aims to explore the impact of streamer emotions on the viewer gifting behaviors, including free and paid gifting. The loyalty level of the viewers is also introduced as a moderating factor to investigate the heterogeneous effect of streamer emotions on gifting behavior.

The dataset the authors collected consists of two parts, including 1809.69 h of live streaming videos and 358,002 gift giving records. Combined with deep learning methods and regression analysis, the authors performed empirical tests on the 81,110 valid samples. Several robustness checks were also conducted to ensure the reliability of main results.

The empirical results show that streamer emotions do have effects on viewers' free and paid gifting behavior. The authors’ findings show that positive streamer expressions, such as happiness and surprise, have a positive influence on viewer gifting behavior. However, some negative expressions, like sadness, can also have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors discovered that higher viewer loyalty amplifies the positive effect of streamer emotions and reduces the negative effect.

This research contributes to the study about streamer emotions and viewers' consumption behavior, which extends the application of emotion as social information model (EASI model) in the live streaming setting. The authors carefully divide the gifting behavior into two types: free and paid, and study how these two types are affected by streamer emotions. Besides, these effects are analyzed within viewers of different loyalty levels. This study offers practical emotion management strategies for streamers and live streaming platforms to gain more economic profits.

This study aims to investigate the factors that affect an audience's purchase decisions on a new type of social media, namely live video streaming platforms.

This study is based on data from an online survey providing 488 valid responses. These responses are used to test the research model by employing partial least squares (PLS) modeling.

Three antecedents (consumer competitive arousal, gift design aesthetics and broadcaster's image) influence the audience's purchase decisions (impulse buying and continuous buying intention). Chinese impression management (mianzi) acts as a moderator. Self-mianzi, mutual mianzi and other mianzi (i.e. three subtypes of mianzi) moderate the effects of consumer competitive arousal, gift design aesthetics and broadcaster's image on impulse buying.

The findings encourage practitioners developing marketing strategies for live video streaming platforms in the Chinese cultural context to consider peer influence, gift appearance, broadcaster's image and mianzi.

Drawing on the community gift-giving model and face-negotiation theory, this study provides an integrated research model to investigate a new type of social media (live video streaming). It offers insight into virtual gifting behaviors by confirming the effects of three antecedents on the audience's purchase decisions, with mianzi acting as a moderator.

This study aims to examine if the participation of live-stream influencers (LSIs) affects tipping frequency on live streaming platforms, and further investigate the mediating and moderating mechanisms.

Quasi-experiment and difference-in-differences models are used for data analysis. Propensity score matching is used to address potential unobservable endogeneity.

Real-time live streaming data reveal that LSIs’ participation significantly improves tipping frequency in live streaming rooms. Also, more users are attracted to the live streaming rooms and more users become active in participation. Additionally, the positive impact of LSIs’ participation is enhanced in the live streaming rooms with a greater number of relationship links between users.

The findings clarify the new role of influencers and reveal the mechanisms on how LSIs benefit the platforms.

The findings offer novel insights into implementing influencer marketing to interactive social media platforms, by encouraging influencer participation, user relationship building and influencer network growth.

This study highlights the value of LSIs for interactive social media platforms in terms of organic growth, revenue generation and cost reduction.

The advent of online live streaming platforms (OLSPs) and online health communities (OHCs) has expedited the integration of traditional medical services with Internet new media technology. Since the practice of physicians conducting live streaming is a relatively new phenomenon, the potential cross-platform effects of such physicians’ live streaming have not received adequate attention.

This study collected data from 616 physicians specializing in cardiology, obstetrics and gynecology and neurology between April and November 2022 on Live.Baidu.com and WeDoctor.com. It constructed a panel data set comprising a total of 4,928 observations over an 8-month period and validated the model using empirical analysis with the fixed-effects method.

We find evidence of cross-platform influence in online healthcare. Physicians’ live streaming behavior (whether live or not and the heat of their streams) on OLSPs positively impacts both their consultation and reputation on OHCs. Additionally, physicians’ ability positively moderates the relationships between live streaming heat and their performance (in terms of consultation volume and reputation) on OHCs. However, ability does not moderate the relationship between physicians’ live streaming status (live or not) and their performance (in terms of consultation and reputation) on OHCs. Furthermore, the attractive appearance of the physicians also significantly moderates the impact in a positive way.

This is one of the pioneering studies on physicians’ live streaming. The study offers vital guidance for physicians and patients utilizing dual platforms and holds significant reference value for platform operators (such as OLSPs and OHCs) aiming to optimize platform operations and for the government in policy formulation and industry regulation.

Cross-border e-commerce live streaming morphs into an epidemic shopping scenario, yet there is a paucity of research on impulse purchasing in this context. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the adoption motivation of cross-border e-commerce live streaming and its influence mechanism on intrinsic response and purchase impulse and to highlight the mediating role of browsing behavior.

Based on the use and gratification lens, a new conceptualization model is established to captivate the theoretical relationships between perceived stimuli, individual attitudes, browsing behavior and impulsive purchases. A questionnaire survey was used to collect cross-sectional data from 427 Malaysian consumers and the estimated framework was validated through AMOS-structural equation modeling technique.

The findings confirm that perceived interactivity, perceived information usefulness and perceived enjoyment significantly influenced positive attitudes toward live-streaming, which in turn induced impulsive purchases; however, perceived affective gratification did not stimulate positive attitudes. Consumers’ utilitarian browsing had a stronger effect on impulse purchases than hedonic browsing and utilitarian browsing behavior mediated the relationship between positive attitudes and impulse buying; however, hedonic browsing had neither a direct nor a mediating effect on impulsive purchases.

This research enhances the literature on the impact of cross-border e-commerce live streaming, an emerging technology, on consumer behavior and offers managerial implications for e-commerce practitioners to gain insights into consumer impulse purchasing behavior.

The findings revamp conventional knowledge and provide new angles for understanding the formation mechanisms of impulse purchases, motivations for virtual media use and browsing behavior mediating effects in the context of live streaming.

This study aimed to understand better what makes esports fans engage with streamers' live-streaming of esports gameplay. This study used the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and additionally adopted streamer identification and esports game identification as moderating variables.

Data were collected from streamers' esports content streaming viewers over 18 years of age using an online survey in Amazon M-Turk (N = 307). Based on past esports live-streaming weekly watching hours, which range from 1 to 45 h, the participants were divided into lower (n = 152) and higher (n = 155) frequency groups. PLS-SEM and bootstrapping techniques were used to test the moderated mediation relationships among the constructs.

This study found a negative moderating effect of past watching experience on the relationship between attitudes and behavioral intention, and it positively moderated the path between perceived behavioral control and behavioral intention. Also, it was found statistically significant direct impacts of streamer identification (STI) and esports game identification (EGI) on attitude and subjective norms. While the indirect impact of STI on behavioral intention through attitude was statistically significant, there were no significant indirect impacts of EGI on attitude and behavioral intention through subjective norms.

Theoretically, this study extends the TPB model by exploring the two identifications (i.e. streamers and esports games) as antecedents of the focal TPB factors (i.e. attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) and the moderating effect of prior experience based on high/low weekly watching frequencies. Practically, content creators of esports live-streaming and live-streaming platform managers can use the study’s findings to develop strategies to nurture their current and future viewership.

This study aims to explore the determinants of viewers’ gifting and social sharing behaviours in online streaming from a dual-attachment perspective and to explain how live streaming fosters attachment through a social interaction aspect.

This study conducted an online survey with 316 valid responses to test the research model. The structural equation modelling approach was applied to assess both the measurement and structural models.

The results show that both bond-based and identity-based attachments promote gifting and social sharing behaviours. Participation and cognitive communion motivate viewers to establish bond-based attachment, while group interaction among viewer crowds encourages viewers to create identity-based attachment. In addition, group interaction can moderate the relationship between participation and bond-based attachment.

This study is one of the earliest attempts to highlight the significance of viewer crowd and viewer-viewer interaction in promoting viewers’ behaviours in live streaming context. This study also indicates that viewer-viewer interaction can moderate the impact of viewer–streamer interaction, which is among the first to investigate the interaction effects of viewer-viewer interaction and viewer–streamer interaction.

With the development of social media, live-streaming has become an indispensable marketing activity for firms, especially in China. From the initial cooperation with the influencer, firms begin to create their own live-streaming channel, namely, the brands' self-built live-streaming. The purpose of this study is to explore the process of consumer engagement in the brands' self-built live-streaming.

This research comprises two experimental studies. Study 1 examined the effect of streamer types (CEO vs. celebrity) on consumer engagement. Study 2 investigated the moderating effects of product innovativeness.

Results showed that CEO streamers could enhance consumer engagement by increasing consumers' cognitive trust, and celebrity streamers could enhance consumer engagement by increasing consumers' emotional trust. In addition, consumer engagement was higher for really new products (vs. incremental new products) in CEO streamers' (vs. celebrity streamers') live-streaming.

Compared with previous studies that focused on streamers based on the influencer marketing, this study expands the scope of research on the live-streaming ecosystem by exploring the effect of different streamer types on the brands' self-built live-streaming. By investigating consumer engagement, this study gives implications for the sustainable traffic issue in live-streaming e-commerce.