They pay for a reason! the determinants of fan's instant sponsorship for content creators

Abstract

This article aims to understand fan's instant sponsorship (FIS), focusing on promoting and hindering factors. FIS refers to viewers' occasional activities that 'pay for items through various methods, usually in the form of cyber money, to content creators on personal broadcasting platforms. We base our use of this term on a review of comparable concepts, such as charitable donations, corporate sponsorships, crowdfunding, Pay-What-You-Want pricing, and fan tributes. Based on each concept's predictors, we conducted a pilot study of items that are likely to influence FIS and then administered an online survey. According to the results, we extracted four promoting factors (the need for recognition, perceived value of FIS, affection for creators, vulnerability to creators' inducement) and three hindering factors (perceived subjective norms, perceived inconvenience in payment, perceived lack of affordability). Among them, perceived value of FIS, affection for creators, and vulnerability to creators' inducements positively affect the intention to sponsor continuously, despite the negative effect of perceived subjective norms. Vulnerability to creators' inducements were the only variable that influenced the amount of sponsorship. The cases of affection to creators and the intention to sponsor continuously revealed the moderating effect of time spent on live-streaming content. We discuss the implications of the results for the field of contents creation and the related subjects.