A Study into Sponsorship Disclosure on Video Sharing Platforms: Evidence from Bilibili

Abstract

Sponsorship disclosure is becoming increasingly important in the marketing field and its business value deserves further exploration. This paper investigates how different types of sponsorship disclosure affects consumers’ purchase intention through influencer trust in the context of video sharing platforms with evidence from Bilibili. Notably, as a distinguished feature of Bilibili, the differences between bullet screen and traditional user comments in their impacts on sponsorship disclosure and customer purchase intention are compared in terms of consumers’ interactivity with the social media influencers. Based on the knowledge persuasion model and signaling theory, the results indicate that influencer trust mediates the relationship between sponsorship disclosure and consumers’ purchase intention both for general and specific sponsorship disclosure, and interactivity positively moderates the relationship between sponsorship disclosure and consumers’ purchase intention only for general sponsorship disclosure.