The Social Impact from Danmu—Insights from Esports Online Videos

Abstract

An emerging online social interaction feature, Danmu, which overlays viewer comments on online videos, has become increasingly popular on video-sharing platforms. Danmu comments may have a social impact on potential viewers’ behavior and thus have important implications for online video consumption. Drawing on Social Impact Theory, this paper explores how Danmu comments affect both viewers’ viewing behavior and engagement behavior in online esports videos. Our results reveal that Danmu comments consistently improved the number of views of esports videos. Danmu comments also positively influenced the level of viewer engagement, but the size of this impact was smaller than that on viewers’ viewing behavior. Moreover, Danmu comments played a greater role in viewers’ viewing behavior of full-length competitive esports matches than that of video clips. Finally, Danmu comments’ differential impacts on viewers’ engagement behavior between full-length matches and video clips vary by esports games.