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

PLoS One. 2016 Feb 5;11(2):e0148377. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148377. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Baseball / psychology*
  • Humans
  • Internet*
  • Markov Chains
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Regression Analysis
  • Republic of Korea
  • Social Media / statistics & numerical data*
  • Sports / psychology
  • Television

Grants and funding

This work was partly supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No.10041313, UX-oriented Mobile SW Platform); (No. B0101-15-1272, Development of Device Collaborative Giga-Level Smart Cloudlet Technology). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.