Purpose Recently, Internet personal broadcasting has been widely spreaded as a new media type by replacing traditional legacy media such as TV. Considering this phenomenon, this study aims to explore the effect of Aristoteles' persuasion factors on Internet personal broadcasting from a rhetorical view. The reason why users watch the Internet personal broadcasting is that they are persuaded by creator's expertness, empathy, or content usefulness. These factors can be regarded as persuasion factors. Therefore, with Aristoteles' rhetorical persuasion factors composed of ethos, pathos, and logos, this paper tries to investigate how persuasion factors affect user's emotional\ attachment and voluntary donation intention. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a model of the relationships among three rhetorical factors, user's emotional attachment, and donation intention. Specifically, ethos is regarded as creator's expertness and trustworthiness, and pathos refers to creator's empathy and social interaction. Last, logos refers to content usefulness and credibility. For testing a hypothetical research model, this study collected 468 surveys and empirically tested hypotheses using a structural equation model. Findings This study investigated how rhetorical factors (ethos, pathos, and logos) and emotional attachment further influence user's donation intention. The findings suggest that rhetorical factors of ethos and pathos enhances emotional attachment, followed by donation intention. Contrary to an expectation, however, logos was not significantly related to emotional attachment. Creators of Internet personal media and MCN providers should focus on the different effects of rhetorical factors and pay attention to the role of emotional attachment to encourage user donation.