What Makes Sports Fans Interactive? Identifying Factors Affecting Chat Interactions in Online Sports Viewing

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 11; no. 2; p. e0148377
• Main Authors: Ko, Minsam, Yeo, Jaeryong, Lee, Juyeong, Lee, Uichin, Jang, Young Jae
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 05.02.2016; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Air pollution; Baseball; Baseball - psychology; Biology and Life Sciences; Communication; Computer & video games; Computer and Information Sciences; Data analysis; Earthquakes; Engineering; Humans; Internet; Lee, Young; Markov Chains; Models, Theoretical; Outdoor air quality; Personal relationships; Physical Sciences; Professional baseball; Regression Analysis; Republic of Korea; Research and Analysis Methods; Researchers; Social Media - statistics & numerical data; Social networks; Social Sciences; Sports - psychology; Sports fans; Sports marketing; Sports spectators; Studies; Television; Web 2.0; Republic of Korea; South Korea
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148377

Sports fans are able to watch games from many locations using TV services while interacting with other fans online. In this paper, we identify the factors that affect sports viewers' online interactions. Using a large-scale dataset of more than 25 million chat messages from a popular social TV site for baseball, we extract various game-related factors, and investigate the relationships between these factors and fans' interactions using a series of multiple regression analyses. As a result, we identify several factors that are significantly related to viewer interactions. In addition, we determine that the influence of these factors varies according to the user group; i.e., active vs. less active users, and loyal vs. non-loyal users.