Competitive Behavior in the Attention Economy - The Case of Twitch Streamers
Wollborn, Philip; Reindl, Matthias; Ehrmann, Thomas
Zusammenfassung
Recent research argues that entrepreneurs who generate their main income through online digital
platforms are subject to specific power asymmetries. The platform firms can often single-handedly
impose changes that can have a strong impact on the success of entrepreneurs using these platforms,
which lead to the term of “platform-dependent entrepreneurs” (PDEs). These dependencies can be
especially crucial within the “attention economy”, meaning community-focused business like social
media platforms. On these platforms, PDEs (e.g. influencers) often are “price-takers” with an explicit
price of zero as their core content is typically free access by other platform users. It is only through the
attention generated by these PDEs that they can build a brand and monetize their content, with typical
examples being sponsorship/advertisement deals, merchandising, exclusive premium content, or paywhat-
you-want options. One particularly interesting platform in this matter is the online live-streaming
platform Twitch. On Twitch, users (streamers) are able to broadcast a diverse portfolio of live content,
typically featuring themselves, while interacting directly with their audience. As live-streams are
typically free to watch for viewers, streamers have only two strategic options at hand to maximize
monetization: what to stream and when to stream. These two options are related to the actual structure
of competition: both the content to be streamed (what) and the time of streaming (when) can be viewed
as an optimal (re-)action to the (re-)actions of all the other streamers active on the platform. In this
context, we provide empirical results regarding the competitive behavior of streamers as well as an
example for the risks and chances of PDEs face through decisions by the platforms they operate on.We
show that streamers tend to pursue temporary clustering in time and content, similarly to the Hotellingmodel,
though not all components of these strategies seem to actually increase audience size and
subsequently income generation.
Schlüsselwörter
-ive streaming platform; streaming behavior; platform-dependent entrepreneurs; strategic options; competition