Research On The Impact Of Factors On Sales Of Knowledge Product

Powered by the development of information technology,the amount of user-generated content has been experiencing explosive growth in recent years.However,with the proliferation of free user-generated content,more and more users become strongly eager for content with high quality.Paying for content solve this issue to a certain extent and meanwhile monetize traffic and content.Platforms allow users to pay for knowledge as the most typical products of paying for content,were launched and received widely attentions recently in China.Zhihu Live is a real-time Q&A product built upon Zhihu community,the usability and functionality of Zhihu Live makes it easy for user to create their own broadcasting lives that can be shared in the community to a wide range of audiences,which makes this an attractive platform to content creators(speakers)and knowledge consumers(audiences).Purchasing pattern of each Live can be divided into two phases with its start date as the boundary point.Before a Live start,potential audience can only get very limited information such as live price.When a live is over,potential audience can receive additional information such as review scores,interactions between speakers and audiences.Such innovative product modality and sales model make Zhihu Live different from traditional knowledge-based products.In order to examine the factors affecting daily sales of a Live,we therefore propose a two-phase hierarchical model to investigate the daily sales of Zhihu lives.Hierarchical Linear model was employed to test our hypotheses.Empirical results suggest that 1)number of "like" and amount of people who have bought the live positively affects daily sales before a live start(phase 1);2)whereas"like" number,audience review score,and interactions between speakers and audiences during the broadcasting process have significant effects on Live’s daily sales after the live starts(phase 2);3)due to the lack of intrinsic cues,price has a nonlinear impact on Live’s daily sales under the mediating of the number of"like".Implications are discussed and limitations are noted.