More Than just Fame: Learning from Internet Celebrities—Uses and Gratifications Perspective

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet Celebrities (ICs) have emerged as the most influential factor on adolescents. Although ICs are simply other users uploading their user-generated content (UGC), they attract followers through their unique combination of similarity, sociability, and a sense of being different from the audience. While ICs were widely discussed in fields like marketing and youth culture, few researches studied their education value. Our study utilize Uses and Gratifications Theory to extract students’ perceptive motivation to learn from ICs’ videos. We surveyed 101 high school students about their motivations to use ICs’ video to learn enterprise finance. These students considered Entertainment, Convenience, and Information were major gratifications they would get by learning from ICs’ videos. We also found past experience with ICs’ videos did influence student’s perceptive Escapism gratification.