Factors Influencing Viewers’ Satisfaction and Gift-Giving Intention in Personal Game Broadcasting: Focusing on the DouYu TV Platform

With the recent development of smart/mobile devices, we have entered the ‘mobile only’ era, in which the personal broadcasting market has rapidly developed. However, there is still a lack of research focusing on both content qualities and creators’ features in a personal broadcasting setting. Therefore, based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and prior studies related to personal broadcasting, this study identified the three key factors of content quality (i.e., value-added, relevance, and completeness) as well as the three important factors of creator features (i.e., reliability, professionalism, and interactivity) in the context of personal game broadcasting. It also verified the effect of these factors on viewers’ satisfaction and gift-giving intention. Furthermore, the moderating roles of viewers’ motivation (i.e., information gathering vs. entertaining purposes) and impulsive purchase propensity in the relationships between influencing factors and satisfaction and also between satisfaction and the two different types of gift-giving intention (i.e., free- and paid-gift-givings), respectively. The results of structural equation model (SEM) analysis with a total of 226 respondents of an online survey revealed that value-added, professionalism, and interactivity have a significant impact on viewers’ satisfaction, which in turn leads to increased gift-giving intention. This study is one of the first attempts to verify influencing factors of viewers’ satisfaction and gift-giving intention in the context of personal game broadcasting by drawing on the ELM. The results of the study may provide useful guidelines to various stakeholders regarding personal game broadcasting such as managers, creators, and viewers.