Xue Bing Peng, Sho Komatsu
The rise of the digital economy has reshaped urban competition, with digital entrepreneurship now at the core of this competition. Yet this phenomenon remains under-theorised and spatially blind. To address this gap, digital entrepreneurs (DEs) – defined as those whose core value-creation activities are carried out in the digital realm and are only made possible through digital technologies – are examined using Douyin vloggers as a representative case. Based on vlogger data from Chinese cities in 2023, fixed effects models are employed for empirical analysis, accompanied by a series of robustness checks. Findings reveal a positive correlation between the number of vloggers in a city and geographical factors such as the mobile phone user base, talent power and the presence of preferential digital-economy policies. Conversely, a negative correlation is observed with per capita gross domestic product. Moreover, divergent agglomeration logics are uncovered among DEs: less influential vloggers tend to be driven by necessity and infrastructure access, whereas highly influential vloggers cluster in technologically advanced cities with high-end urban amenities.