The Secret of Internet Celebrities: A Qualitative Study of Online Opinion Leaders on Weibo

Abstract

Internet celebrities are widely observable on social media platforms and are an essential component to a social media marketing program. Drawing on the media success literature and online influencer research, this study reflects Internet celebrities' fameseeking practices and discusses on three issues from literature: definition of Internet celebrities, Internet celebrities' identification criteria and what factors can contribute to individual online influence. A series of interview from three Internet celebrities and three followers of each celebrity were conducted to enrich this study. The results show that Internet celebrities are people who have become famous by means of Internet, and have the ability to influence others. They are characterized as having a certain number of followers; high level of interactivity on their profile; and promising business value. Moreover, this study suggests a five-dimensional perspective to understand individual online influence. We believe that these findings provide new insights for interpretation of Internet celebrities and suggest a possible success formula for fame-seekers to achieve influence on the increasingly competitive social media platforms.

Investigation of the Attitudes Towards Celebrities Endorsed Advertisements – Audience Groups Comparison

“…Hence, traditional celebrities are represented by actors, athletes, musicians, models, Tv stars, comedians, writers, etc. (Osei-Frimpong, Donkor and Owusu-Frimpong, 2019; Knoll and Matthes, 2017), while Internet celebrities are online opinion leaders who have gained fame on the Internet and are able to influence others through Social Media platforms -vloggers, bloggers and Instafamous personalities (Li, 2018). Lately, companies have begun to increasingly use Internet celebrities or micro-celebrities to endorse their products in addition or instead of traditional celebrities (Marvick, 2015, De Veirman et al, 2017; Hwang and Zhang, 2018; Gräve, 2017) for several reasons.…”

Introduction

“…With the proliferation of live video and livestreaming apps, an emergent crop of research is also focusing on Snapchat (i.e., Gkoni, Edo, Bollen, & Ecott, 2017;Phua & Kim, 2018), Twitch (i.e., Bingham, 2017;Johnson & Woodcock, 2017), and ecologies of livestreaming (i.e., Blight, 2016). Arising from the Chinese digital ecology, a stream of research is also now focused on cultures of internet celebrity specific to Douyu (i.e., Zhang & Hjorth, 2017), musical.ly (i.e., van de Put, 2017), and Weibo (i.e., Li, 2018;Wang, 2017).…”

“…Shifting away from Anglo-centric, English-speaking, global North platforms, some research is also emerging from national scapes with distinctive internet governance and platform politics. A few examples outside of the US and UK include Asia: China (i.e., Li, 2018;Meng, 2014;Wang, 2017;Zhang & Hjorth, 2017), Malaysia (i.e., Hopkins, 2019), Indonesia (i.e., Meylinda, 2017;Rahmawan, 2014), Singapore (i.e., Abidin, 2017c), South Korea (i.e., Chae, 2017); and in Europe: the Czech Republic (i.e., Sedláček, 2016;Vochocová, 2018) and Norway (i.e., Bakke, 2017), to name a few.…”

“…As an increasing number of microcelebrities are turning to parlay their online fame into commercial enterprises, a new string of works are now investigating the process of commercialism in the industry. These include studies on becoming a microcelebrity (i.e., Bakke, 2017;Li, 2018;Meylinda, 2017;van de Put, 2017;Wang, 2017), monetization (i.e., Chen et al, 2017;Hopkins, 2019), branding and self-branding (i.e., Booth & Matic, 2011;Chandawarkar et al, 2018;Khamis et al, 2017;Mercer, 2018), professionalism (i.e., Bingham, 2017), audiencing and follower engagement (i.e., Blight, 2016;Gkoni et al, 2017;Neal, 2017;Sedláček, 2016), and the expansion of their brands to include romantic partners (i.e., Abidin, 2016c) and their young children (i.e., Abidin, 2015b).…”

The Effect of Online Unpaid Reviews made by Renowned Vloggers: the Case of Smartphones

“…popularized through TV and other types of offline media, the internet celebrities earned public recognition by displaying different abilities on social media platforms and include vloggers, bloggers, streamers, "instafamous", etc. (Li, 2018). Albeit internet celebrities borrow some characteristics from traditional celebrities as public recognition, fame, admiration or power to attract millions of fans/followers, there are significant differences in the way they interact with their audience.…”