Purchasing Intimacy: Emotional Consumption Patterns in Live- Stream Tipping

This study explores the live-stream tipping practices of Chinese audiences, emphasizing the emotional consumption motives and gendered interaction dynamics embedded in these behaviors. With digital live streaming becoming a normalized mode of entertainment and communication, tipping has evolved into a distinctive channel through which individuals engage in mediated forms of sociality and pursue emotional comfort. Drawing on entertainment-oriented live streams on Chinese apps as the empirical context, this research adopts a qualitative approach that uses semi-structured interviews with streamers and audiences. The analysis identifies two emotionally driven modes of tipping: the “romantic-fantasy” type and the “quasi-kin companionship” type. The romantic-fantasy form predominantly occurs in cross-sex contexts, where tipping functions as a means for audiences to secure individualized emotional attention from streamers, co-creating a form of virtual intimacy . In contrast, the quasi-kin companionship form is largely gender-neutral allowing audiences to perceive streamers as familiar companions and cultivate enduring relational bonds through sustained, small-scale tipping, thereby constructing an “internet family.” Overall, this article contends that live-stream tipping cannot be reduced to a simple economic exchange. Rather, as a practice of emotional consumption, it illuminates the layered processes of emotional commodification in the digital media environment and reveals the gendered contours of affective interaction within online communities.