Solicited PWYW donations on social live streaming services through reciprocal actions between streamers and viewers

Abstract

A donation model, referred to as social tipping and gift-giving, is a new monetization model in the virtual world that has expanded rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such donations are not charity but gifts by service recipients (buyers) to support service providers (sellers). In the virtual world, donations are visible to all participants, and further donations are likely induced one after another. Therefore, analysing donations in the virtual world as a collective action is worthwhile. This study took Twitch, a live streaming platform, and statistically analysed its log data of the top 100 streamers’ virtual communities. In Twitch, there is no upper limit to the number of donations. Thus, the donations can be thought of as a pay-what-you-want (PWYW) donation. This paper analyses the behaviour of subscription gifting as PWYW donation using the log data from TwitchTracker.com. The analysis, involving service-dominant logic as an analysis framework, revealed that mutual efforts through interactions between streamers (sellers) and viewers (buyers) accelerated PWYW-donation behaviour and co-created value of the services by the streamers. This study also provides the theoretical and practical implications of the results and contributes toward the future monetization of collective action in the virtual world.