Beyond Viewership : How Streamer-Viewer Interactivity Shapes Gendered Economy of Live-Streamed Media

In traditional media, such as television and newspaper, the economic value of content has been determined by ratings and advertisement values predominantly based on the size and characteristics of consumers. This framework has rarely been changed even in social media, except in live-streamed media, wherein content creators (or streamers) and consumers (or viewers) can actively respond to each other in real-time. Specifically, live-streaming viewers can affect streamers’ earnings by giving streamers virtual gifts in real-time, which can be converted into cash. Building on the communication interactivity framework, we propose and empirically show that such streamer-viewer interactivity creates a novel gender gap in earnings in live-streamed media. Leveraging a proprietary dataset from one of the largest live-streaming platforms in South Korea, we find that female streamers receive more virtual gifts than their male counterparts even after capturing viewership and viewer heterogeneity. Furthermore, we find suggestive evidence that communication interactivity substantially contributes to this gap by examining heterogeneity across streamer/viewer characteristics, mediation of non-monetary live-chat amount, and moderating effects of visual/audio features