Factors affecting purchase intention in YouTube videos

Abstract

YouTube is one of the new social media platforms that has received minimal research related to consumer purchase behavior. This paper aims to identify the factors that affect purchase intention of consumers who watch product related YouTube videos. Online questionnaires for consumers who watch make-up / beauty videos on YouTube are used to investigate the hypotheses. Structural equation modeling approach is used to explore the relationships in the model with a total of 8685 valid questionnaires. The findings reveal that product related videos on YouTube are important for influencing consumers’ purchase intentions. In addition, several factors affect purchase intention on different levels. This study is one of the rare studies that combine YouTube videos and their effects on purchase intention and by using YouTube videos, this study extends previous research on purchase intention related to other social media platforms. Also it introduces new factors that are specific to YouTube.