The gaming experience from a viewer¿s perspective

This book intends to enhance our understanding in the field of online consumer behaviour by exploring the popular phenomenon of branded user-generated content and the consumers' emotional responses to such content that seem to be overlooked by the current literature. Given the numerous forms of the available user-generated content, the study is focused on a particular type of user-generated videos on YouTube named "Let's Play" videos and the viewers' generated emotions while consuming them. The research results indicate that the consumption of such media content is a highly emotive experience dominated by pleasurable feelings and that users are significantly attached to the watched content as well as to its creators. Consequently they formulate a cohesive online community of fans that offer valuable marketing implications and propose an altered way of media consumption.