What Makes Live Events Engaging on Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat

You Watch, You Give, and You Engage

“…Work by Hu et al [10] did attempt to understand why users kept watching on live streaming platforms, and found that self-identification with the broadcaster and viewing group increased the motivation to keep watching. Haimson et al [7] studied what makes live events engaging by comparing Facebook Live and Snapchat Live Stories. They found that immersion, immediacy, interaction, and sociality were important to the engagement of watching live events.…”

“…These questions included mostly yes/no, multiple choice, or 5 point Likert-style questions and focused on understanding whether the respondent is a viewer, a streamer, or both, how long s/he watches a live stream, which features of live streaming platforms s/he uses most often, what factors of streamers attract him/her to keep on watching them, and other similar questions. The items were adapted from existing survey study on live streaming in China [42], as well as previous research on user engagement [7] (e.g., entertainment, sociality, information and interactivity). English and Chinese versions of the questionnaire, along with complete anonymized response data, can be found in an appendix to this submission.…”

“…We received 902 completed surveys, which we reviewed using manual inspection and SoJump's data cleaning tools. In total, 375 responses were removed from the data set for one or more of the following reasons: not being a live streaming user (257), failing our "trap" questions (12), time of completion (55), patterned responses (36), or for providing fake or gibberish text responses (15); this cleaning method followed [7]. This left 527 completed responses for analysis.…”

“…Twitch.tv, the popular gameplay-based live streaming platform has more than 2.2 million active streamers per month [8,35]. Despite the popularity of Twitch.tv, live streaming in North America has only recently begun to enter into mainstream culture, through the advent of Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Periscope [7,18,33]. Although a few research projects have focused on understanding the live streaming phenomenon, they have been largely confined to understanding North American usage [7,8,18,26,33].…”

“…Chinese live streams differ greatly in content, style, and form compared to those in North America and Europe. Previous studies of US and Canadian live streaming have found that live streaming was almost exclusively for live events [7,33] or sharing among close friends [18]. In contrast, Chinese users utilize live streaming for a wide array of uses, such as panentertainment (i.e.…”