The Effects of Personal Branding, Content Quality, and Digital Interaction on Audience Engagement: The Mediating Role of Parasocial Closeness on Windah Basudara's Youtube Channel

This study investigates how personal branding, content quality, and digital interaction influence audience engagement and examines whether parasocial closeness mediates these relationships among viewers of Windah Basudara’s YouTube channel. A quantitative explanatory design was applied through a cross-sectional survey of 160 eligible viewers residing in Greater Tangerang. Respondents were selected using purposive sampling. The proposed model was analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4 using 10,000 bootstrap subsamples. All direct paths were positive and significant. Parasocial closeness was the strongest direct predictor of audience engagement (β = 0.391), whereas personal branding was the strongest antecedent of parasocial closeness (β = 0.394). Parasocial closeness significantly mediated the effects of personal branding (βindirect = 0.154), content quality (βindirect = 0.120), and digital interaction (βindirect = 0.117), indicating complementary partial mediation. The study is cross-sectional and limited to one creator and one urban Indonesian context. Creators should combine a distinctive identity, consistently valuable content, and meaningful interaction to strengthen perceived closeness. The study integrates three creator-controlled antecedents and positions parasocial closeness as the psychological mechanism linking them to audience engagement in an Indonesian gaming-creator context.