A Study of Subscription Gifting as Donation on Twitch Social Live Streaming Service Under COVID-19 Pandemic Situation

On social live streaming services such as Twitch, live broadcasting by digital game players, or streamers, has become more and more active, and the number of viewers has sharply increased since the spring of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitch offers subscription gifting as a way for viewers to donate to streamers. A viewer purchases a subscription to a streamer's channel and gifts it to another viewer. The subscription fee is divided between Twitch and the streamer at a specific ratio. Subscription gifting increased sharply for each streamer in the spring of 2020 than before. This paper focuses on the increase in subscription gifting and provides a correlation analysis between subscription gifting and social density in the virtual world during the pandemic in the spring of 2020 using real Twitch data from TwitchTracker.com. We hypothesize that the increase in social density due to the sharp increase in the number of viewers during the pandemic has led to this significant increase in subscription gifting. We anticipate that the results of our analysis can contribute to the design of new services in the post-pandemic new normal with a better understanding of human behavior in emergency situations.