Influencer-Focused Barrages in Product Demo Videos: An Exploratory Study

Barrages, or live comments from viewers, are a popular and important element in videos on social media platforms, facilitating active viewer interaction and content co-creation. Prior studies have examined the impacts of barrage volume on video effectiveness, overlooking its content types. Drawing from uses and gratification theory, this study investigates a specific type of barrage—those on influencers—and its impact on the effectiveness of product demo videos. An empirical study on 186,842 barrages in 151 influencer-led product demo videos on social media confirms the positive effect of barrage volume on video effectiveness measured by “likes” and “collects” counts. Intriguingly, influencer-focused barrages, although small in volume (7%), exert additional positive impacts. Moreover, while video effectiveness diminishes with longer duration, the effect of influencer-focused barrages increases with video duration, being more prominent in longer videos than shorter ones. This study underscores the necessity of delving into and comprehending barrage content, shedding light on its heterogeneous intrinsic values.