‘Let’s purchase coloured live chat messages’: the impact of user engagement with Super Chat on YouTube

This research addresses the ways users engage with Super Chat in YouTube live streams and the impact of Super Chat on user participation in real-time communities. Super Chat is a feature available in YouTube live streams that enables users to purchase a highlighted comment and helps users gain visibility among peer audiences. While existing research mainly examined Super Chat’s economic implications for YouTube’s development of the digital economy, this article, from a sociocultural perspective, critically analyses the ways users engage with Super Chat and the impact of Super Chat on user participation and inclusiveness. Adopting the theoretical framework from participatory culture and the affordance approach, I used digital ethnography of user engagement with the top ten most super-chatted accounts in the UK for three months and semi-structured interviews with 23 participants. According to the amount of money spent on Super Chat, viewers of live streams were stratified and distinguished by different colours of chats, which created a visibility hierarchy of paid and non-paid viewers in live communities. Thus, this study argues that Super Chat in live streams, to some extent, benefits users when they harness the feature to fulfil cultural capacities (e.g., sociality, information acquisition, and the power of discourse), whereas user participation with Super Chat indicates the rationalisation of consuming inequalities, which perpetuates hierarchical online communities under the disguise of entertainment. This article contributes to human-technology interaction research in live streams and offers practical implications for platforms and content creators to facilitate inclusive online communities.