Analysis of pay-what-you-want donation behavior in game communities on social live streaming services

Abstract

It is becoming more and more common in online services for service recipients to make donations when they are satisfied with the service provided by the service provider. Since these donations have no upper limit and can be repeated, they can be thought of as Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) donations. This study takes Twitch as a case study and statistically analyzes the PWYW donation behaviors in live streaming channels on Twitch, where a community consists of a service provider (a live streamer) and the service recipients (viewers). The study reveals that viewer PWYW donation behaviors are influenced by the degree of viewer congestion in a channel by analyzing the top 100 live streaming channels on Twitch. Moreover, the study also reveals the large degree of channel diversity among the top 100 channels.