Employing Eye Tracking to Study Visual Attention to Live Streaming: A Case Study of Facebook Live

Abstract

In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the development of a new business model, “Live Streaming + Ecommerce”, which is a new method for commercial sales that shares the goal of sustainable economic growth (SDG 8). As information technology finds its way into the digital lives of internet users, the real-time and interactive nature of live streaming has overturned the traditional entertainment experience of audio and video content, moving towards a more nuanced division of labor with multiple applications. This study used a portable eye tracker to collect eye movement information from participants watching Facebook Live, with 31 participants who had experience using the live streaming platform. The four eye movement indicators, namely, latency of first fixation (LFF), duration of first fixation (DFF), total fixation durations (TFD), and the number of fixations (NOF), were used to analyze the distribution of the visual attention in each region of interest (ROI) and explore the study questions based on the ROIs. The findings of this study were as follows: (1) the fixation order of the ROIs in the live ecommerce platform differed between participants of different sexes; (2) the DFF of the ROIs in the live ecommerce platform differed among participants of different sexes; and (3) regarding the ROIs of participants on the live ecommerce platform, participants of different sexes showed the same attention to the live products according to the TFD and NOF eye movement indicators. This study explored the visual search behaviors of existing consumers watching live ecommerce and provides the results as a reference for operators and researchers of live streaming platforms.