Who Watches Live Streaming in China? Examining Viewers’ Behaviors, Personality Traits, and Motivations

With millions of viewers globally, live streaming is a new social media that can deliver video content in real time and with many social interaction functions. Our research aims to understand the personality traits and the motivations of active live streaming viewers as well as their user behaviors in the general population in China. Our results indicate that extraversion was negatively associated with live streaming use, while openness was positively associated. The main motivations to watch live streaming were social interaction, information gathering, and entertainment, and they were associated with different frequencies of use and genre selection. Financial tipping behavior was positively associated with social interaction. Furthermore, motivations mediated the effects of personality traits on live streaming use. People high in openness were more likely to be motivated to chat by information needs. Among extraverts, those who were more social watched fewer streams. We demonstrated that personality traits and motivations can jointly predict live streaming use. The current study not only provides the first evidence of live streaming use with personality traits and motivations but also expands the perspective on individual difference with the mediation analysis. Practically, the person–situation joint interpretation can give industry a clear indication on how to design personalized user experience for people with different personality traits and motivations.