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Introduction
Twitch is a video-game streaming platform acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1bn. It is the largest livestreaming online marketplace; its success can largely be attributed to competitive and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. It has over 15 million active daily visitors, mostly male (81.5%) and aged 18–34 (55%; Twitch Advertising, 2020). Twitch includes two audiences: streamers and spectators. Each month, over 3 million unique streamers broadcast themselves playing. Annually, over 38,000 games were livestreamed across 9 million channels (Twitch Advertising, 2020), with 8.4 billion hours of consumption (Batchelor, 2019), averaging over 20 h/week/person (Davis, 2014). Although the user population is attractive, leading Amazon to promote Twitch as an advertising platform for a hard-to-reach audience, marketers’ understanding of consumer behavior and motivations underlying the explosive growth in such platforms is limited. Twitch largely consists of individuals livestreaming consumption expressly to have others watch, so it presents an interesting opportunity to further our understanding of live observation of others’ normally private user behaviors [vicarious consumption (VC)].
Why would spectators enjoy watching enough to cause Twitch’s astronomical growth? Unlike traditional broadcast media designed for passively consumed public entertainment, this includes real-time active participation by streamers and spectators and provides content that is usually private. Many users prefer spectating (Cesar and Geerts, 2011). This entertainment genre is also known as “social TV” – illustrating its transformative shift in media delivery and consumption. The distinction is clear: consumption is multidirectional with live engagement.
VC’s massive increase as entertainment makes it an incredibly important phenomenon to study not only in gaming but also across other products and services, such as beauty, personal care, apparel, food and travel. As this billion-dollar industry and VC continue to grow, it is imperative for practitioners and researchers to not only understand the context but also develop a theory to explain its antecedents, behaviors and consequences, as this shift in consumer behavior will likely continue to change the nature of consumption.
Unfortunately, little research on video-game livestreaming exists for the marketing context, with a few notable exceptions, such as Sjöblom and Hamari (2017), who examined drivers of motivations to watch esports (not generalizable video-game livestreaming, which encompasses more than esports). Much remains to learn about this phenomenon and its affective, behavioral and cognitive outcomes....