| In recent years,users’ high demand for quality content in Q&A communities has contributed to the continuous development of the paid Q&A model.Most of the respondents who provide paid Q&A services are opinion leaders in the community and can provide quality assurance for the platform content.Currently,there are two main modes of user payment on paid Q&A platforms:paid questioning and paid spectating.Most existing studies focus on questioners’ willingness to pay and responders’ selection behavior,but there is less literature on users’ paying behavior for existing answers.It refers to the community users who pay a small fee to view the ready-made answers contributed by the respondent,in addition to both sides of the paid questioning.As a result,the community further realizes the long-tail traffic to realize the continuous benign operation of the platform.Therefore,studying the antecedent influencing factors of users’ paid spectatorship not only enriches the research in this area,but also provides guidance to the operation of existing Q&A platforms.Some researchers have started to focus on the users’ paying behavior for existing answers,mostly exploring the factors influencing users’ paid behavior through questioner and responder characteristics,but there is relatively little literature dissecting the impact of community users’ multi-channel feedback information on the paid behavior.It is worth noting that the online word-of-mouth of the respondent has a useful role for community users.This study takes users’ paid spectatorship behavior as the dependent variable,uses the HSM model as a reference theoretical framework,analyzes both heuristic and systematic cues.This study sets the level of responders’free answers as a moderating variable to verify the hypothesis.In this study,a two-way.fixed effects negative binomial model was constructed using an econometric approach.This study randomly collected three months of panel data related to users’ paid activities in Zhihu Q&A community,and after data cleaning using python tools,24,480 valid paid Q&A message records per period were used as the study dataset to validate the model hypotheses using Stata data analysis tools.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)In the paid Q&A community,there is a significant influence of question characteristics factors on users’ paid spectatorship behavior,specifically,there is a negative influence of question length on users’ paid spectatorship behavior,a positive influence of question price on users’ paid spectatorship behavior,and an inverted U-shaped relationship between question rationality and its paid spectatorship volume.(2)The electronic word-of-mouth of respondents mainly reflects the level of their paid Q&A services in the form of online comments,which also has an impact on users’ paid spectatorship.This study verifies the positive influence of comment rating on users’ paid spectatorship,the positive influence of positive affective tendency of comments on users’paid spectatorship,and the negative influence of comment quantity on users’ paid spectatorship.(3)Respondents’ free response behavior becomes one of the decision bases of users’ paid spectatorship behavior in the community.The positive influence of comment rating on users’ paid spectator behavior is strengthened with the increase of respondent’s free response level,and the negative influence of comment quantity on users’ paid spectator behavior is strengthened with the increase of respondent’s free response level.The innovation of this study is to explore the influence of question and comment feature factors on users’ paid spectatorship behavior through a new perspective,effectively enriching the study of users’ paid spectatorship behavior in paid Q&A communities.It also combines free knowledge contribution behavior,paid knowledge contribution behavior,and knowledge payment behavior to explain the intrinsic mechanism of the role of the level of free answers generated by the respondent,which broadens the ideas for research in the field of user knowledge payment behavior.Finally,this study also provides some practical guidance for community operators on how to improve the design of paid Q&A functions and stimulate users’ motivation to pay for spectatorship. |
