VTuber Attractiveness and Its Effect on Viewer Gifting

VTubers combine live human and virtual avatar and represent a burgeoning industry of voice acting in livestreaming. They earn by receiving gifts from viewers and their attractiveness plays a substantial role in this career. However, unlike human counterparts, VTubers’ analogous avatars and restricted expressions make it difficult to define their physical attractiveness. This study explores the attractiveness of VTubers in dimensions of similarity, familiarity and likability, and extends its measures in terms of vocal and verbal supplements. In particular, the similarity is proxied through the text distance between VTubers’ verbal content and viewers’ comments, while the likability is replenished by their speech rate and pitch variability. We also empirically investigate the effect of VTuber attractiveness on viewer gifting, and find that all the dimensions of VTuber attractiveness increase viewer gifting significantly. And the class identity of viewers moderates this positive effect. Implications in theory and practice are further discussed.