Community Gifting and Recipients' Engagement with Peers and Influencers: Evidence from Natural Experiments on Twitch

Community gifting, the phenomenon of donating digital goods to peers without selecting specific recipients, is one of live streaming's key social technologies for engaging online communities. In this study, the authors investigate the causal relationship between receiving a community gift and the recipient's subsequent social and monetary engagement behaviors by exploiting the randomization of recipient assignment on a popular live streaming platform, Twitch. They find that, relative to nonrecipients within a five-minute window of a community gifting event, community gift recipients exhibit a 69% chance of directing an additional message toward their peers, a 35% chance of directing an additional message toward the streamer, and a 5% chance of gifting an incremental subscription to the community. However, recipients are no more likely to tip the streamer. The authors apply computational linguistics methods to illustrate that recipients' increased social engagement is accompanied by elevated sentiment and an increased likelihood of joining existing conversations. Finally, a series of moderator analyses show that recipients' gifting behavior is less frequent when there are more gifting events prior to the focal community gift, enabling the recipient to hide. Moreover, the social engagement effect of receiving a community gift is greater when prior chatter is more voluminous and discontinuous, that is, when it is easier for the recipient to jump into the chat. We conclude that the spillovers to social engagement are more important than those to financial reciprocity given the positive feedback loop implied by our moderator analysis. Our results reveal how and when community gifting impacts audience engagement.