ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

In recent years, influencers on social media have been actively adopted as sources of information for products. The phenomenon has been common across most product categories. Although the academia has noticed the spread of this phenomenon and numerous studies in this field have been conducted, specific analysis of consumers' comments containing direct responses to influencers and advertising content have not yet been actively made, and even studies investigating the differences in the effects of different types of influencers, such as micro and mega influencers, have not examined the specifics of advertising effects on the content. Therefore, this study aims to overcome the limited scope of existing studies by analyzing 160 contents of YouTube influencers (80 each of mega and micro influencers) and 8,000 comments (50 for each content). In addition, to examine the differences by product category raised in previous studies, the study selected representative utilitarian (IT products) and hedonic goods (food products), which have yielded influencer contents in most. The results show that micro-influencers were generally more effective across key measures. When standardized numbers proportional to the number of subscribers were compared, micro-influencers outperformed mega-influencers on commonly used effectiveness metrics (e.g., number of likes). Comparisons of ad effectiveness-related metrics (e.g., reactions to brands) also showed a dominance of micro-influencers, with only a handful of metrics showing relative superiority for mega-influencers.

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