Functional or social? Effect of bullet screen type on consumers' continuous watching intention in e-commerce live-streaming

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of different bullet screen types (functional vs social) on the continuous watching intention of consumers, as well as the influence mechanism. In addition, this study analyses the moderating role of consumer motivational orientation on the above effects. Design/methodology/approach First, objective data were obtained through the crawler to test the proposed hypotheses. An objective data analysis (417 group sample) was conducted to analyse the relationship between the percentage of social bullet screens and consumers sustained growth ratio to indirectly test the primary effect. Second, a questionnaire survey was conducted to test (176 questionnaires) the mediating role of perceived social crowding. Finally, a simulated online contextual experiment (340 participants) is conducted to explore the moderating role of consumer motivational orientation. Findings First, functional bullet screens produce higher continuous watching intention and lower perceived social crowding than social bullet screens. Second, perceived social crowding mediates the relationship between bullet screen type and continuous watching intention. Third, consumers' motivational orientation type (task-motivated vs recreation-motivated) moderates the relationship among bullet screen type, perceived social crowding and continuous watching intention. Originality/value The results of this study shed light on the differential impact of different types of bullet screens (functional and social) on consumers' continuous watching intentions, which makes up for the lack of research on the content of bullet screens in the field of livestreaming. Meanwhile, compared with the previous positive psychological research perspective, this study explores the intermediate mechanism of bullet screen type on consumers' continuous watching intention through a negative psychological perspective, which helps e-commerce companies and streamers better understand the differential impact of different bullet screens. Finally, this study explores the joint influence effect of bullet screen and consumer motivation type, which fills the theoretical research gap of consumer motivation orientation type in the category of live-streaming.