How user-created YouTube content influences young adult purchase intent in the computer games industry.

Abstract

This report discusses the recent phenomena of young adults watching gameplay footage online. Although academic literature is relatively scarce in this field, certainly compared to the wealth of literature on some of the more main stream topics such as leadership or events management, this report drew on literature from a combination of the existing online advertising literature and some articles from newspapers and magazines which, although not as credible as journal articles, were highly relevant to the research project. The research was carried out in two stages. The first stage consisted of two focus groups involving a total of 10 young adults while the second stage consisted of a short email interview with a games developer. As a result, data was gathered from a small group of people and so further research should be conducted on this topic with a larger sample to validate these findings. The issue of video length was investigated and it was concluded that there is no one length of video more effective than others. Young adults generally prefer watching shorter videos, although will watch longer videos if they contain multiple content creators. Young adults also tend to watch longer videos if they are fans of a content creator but sometimes play a longer video in the background while doing other things meaning they only hear the game and do not see it. The main finding of this project is that marketers should be aware that there are many influencers of young adult purchase intent and that YouTube content creators should be targeted depending on the target market and the game itself for this advertising method to be effective.