Digital gifting in personal brand communities of live-streaming: fostering viewer–streamer–viewer parasocial relationships

Increasingly popular live-streaming applications, such as 17 Media, offer new mechanisms of social exchange through digital gifting in real time. The present study provides an advanced theoretical framework, which synthesizes parasocial interactions and community-driven gifting based on the concept of the consumer-brand-consumer triad to explore this new phenomenon in live-streaming environments. The study uses a mixed-methods qualitative...