Streamer Dynamics in Live Streaming Commerce

Abstract

Live streaming commerce (LSC) has seen remarkable global success, attracting growing interest from both academics and practitioners. While prior research has explored various factors affecting viewer engagement, the competitive dynamics among streamers on LSC platforms remain largely underexplored. Conventional wisdom holds that competitor entry leads to demand substitution due to cannibalization, yet recent empirical findings highlight the potential for demand spillovers through market expansion. This paper contributes to the “substitution versus spillover” debate by investigating how competitor entry impacts the performance of other streamers’ LSC shows, particularly during different stages of the customer journey. Leveraging an exogenous event where a prominent streamer made an unannounced return to a platform after an extended absence, we apply a difference-in-differences specification to assess its impact on competing streamers’ performance, measured by peak concurrent viewers and sales of their LSC shows. Our results show that the dominance of either spillover or substitution effect depends on the stage of the customer journey (browsing or purchasing). On the one hand, the top streamer’s return increased peak concurrent viewers for competing streamers, demonstrating a spillover effect during the browsing stage. On the other hand, the same event simultaneously reduced their sales, reflecting a substitution effect during the purchasing stage. Further analyses reveal that while competitor entry helped boost viewership for other streamers, it also resulted in a notable shrinkage in their follow base, contributing to the observed demand substitution. Our findings lead to actionable guidance for LSC platform managers in resource allocation and streamer management strategies.

Keywords: live streaming, spillovers, substitution, competitor entry, digital platform