Abstract:
This study sought to explore how the technological affordances of YouTube livestream aid Kenyan artists in creating engagement with their audiences. The objectives of the study were; To establish how aspects of YouTube’s performance expectancy enable artists to use YouTube livestream services to engage with their audiences; To explicate how the media attributes of YouTube livestream enable Kenyan artists to engage with their audiences; and To interrogate the gratifications derived by the artists who use YouTube livestream services to engage with their audiences. A sample of 18 artists was recruited through a purposive snowballing technique for the in-depth interviews. Findings indicate that YouTube’s Performance expectancy was shown by YouTube being useful, providing connection capabilities and advantages over other video and livestream-sharing platforms. Media attributes like involvement and creation of engagement, interactivity, navigability and the timeliness of YouTube also increase engagement. Gratifications derived from YouTube included content gratifications, sharability, social gratifications, process gratifications, and technological gratifications. This study recommends that artists should look out for best practices on YouTube livestreams for engagement. Artists need to invest their time to grow engagement on YouTube livestream by realizing that they must be intentional to grow their YouTube; artists could do a Cost Benefit Analysis of YouTube to realize if the effort they put in pays. This study recommends that YouTube increase the monetization rates for Kenyan content and add an interlude of some short questions to the videos as they play to collect feedback. Further studies should compare YouTube to other video streaming applications, unearth whether future comments will have an inference on engagement and question whether the audience gets gratified by collecting comment-level feedback.
