Gaining Popularity through Sponsorship in the Open Source Software Community

Peer-to-peer sponsorship—the monetary donation from one user to another—is a growing trend on online community platforms. However, existing research primarily focuses on the sponsee perspective. The potential gains for sponsors providing sponsorship remain largely unknown. Using a large panel dataset collected over 52 months from GitHub, the world’s largest open source software (OSS) community, we examine the impact of sponsoring others on the popularity of an individual’s OSS projects and how the individual’s tenure and disclosure of affiliations within the community moderate this relationship. Our findings reveal a positive impact of providing sponsorship on project popularity. Moreover, individuals with shorter tenure and those who do not publicly disclose affiliations experience a greater increase in project popularity following their sponsorship. Our study is among the first to examine the gains for sponsors in peer-to-peer sponsorship, offering valuable insights for online communities and their members.