What Drives Streamers? Users’ Characteristics and Motivations on Social Live Streaming Services

Abstract

With platforms such as YouNow, Periscope and Ustream, a new type of social networking services (SNSs) became popular, namely general social live streaming services (SLSSs). SLSSs combine Live-TV and social media, leading to video-based social computing. In the empirical part of the paper, we are going to answer three research questions: (1) What are the motivations of the streamers? (2) Is there a relation between motivations and streamed contents? (3) Do gender-specific and generational differences in motivation exist? As research methods, we worked with the systematic observations and content analysis of live online videos (N = 7,667).