Understanding the Gift-Sending Interaction on Live-Streaming Video Websites

A new format of online videos called live-streaming videos gains its popularity day by day. The idea of watching what a streamer is doing and interacting with him/her attracts a lot of users and leads to the boom of live-streaming websites in the world. This study investigates the live-streaming website and the gift-sending interaction on it, using data crawled from one of the biggest live-streaming websites in China-Douyu.com. Our result shows the distributions of gifts and senders are very skewed, most gifts are bought by a small number of viewers and most gifts are received by a small number of channels. Meanwhile, more viewers and more time spent on a channel usually leads to more profit. Seeing others sending gifts also makes one viewer more likely send gifts. Some future research aspects are discussed.