Almost a Close Friend? Parasocial Interaction and Celebrity Worship of YouTuber Followers

• Main Authors: HSU, HUA-MIN, 許華珉
• Other Authors: YANG, YUN-HSIOU
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/r9e3uj

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 企業管理學系 === 106 === With the popularity of the Internet and smart phones, also with the diversity of social platforms. YouTuber becomes a new generation of "Internet celebrities", which gradually has different but significant influences on their own audience. In the research, we developed into empirical studies to discuss whether the audience had a Parasocial interaction and celebrity worship on YouTuber, and also to understand the factors which result in. We used an online survey (n=641) in the study1. The results showed: (1) the degree of familiarity is higher, the more YouTuber disclose themselves, it is easier to make audience have parasocial interaction, (2) Parasocial interaction affects the audience to generate celebrity worship; furthermore, it affects the audience have Intention to follow YouTuber or not. In study2(n=283), we developed an experiment of two scenarios: high self-disclosure and low self-disclosure. We used online survey and collected 283 valid questionnaires. The result shows that: (1) the high self-disclosure situation has significant positive effects both on the parasocial interaction and celebrity worship. To conclude it, we would say that the more personal information revealed by YouTuber, the more it can stimulate the audience to produce parasocial interaction on them. With the higher parasocial interaction, audience is more likely to worship YouTuber. Furthermore, it would influence them to decide following YouTuber continuously or not.