Abstract
With the explosive growth of information and the increase of people’s fragmented time, the knowledge payment industry’s market size is growing. However, the heterogeneity between online knowledge payment behavior and traditional consumption gradually comes to the fore. It is of great practical significance to analyze the factors influencing users’ online knowledge payment behavior and clarify users’ online knowledge payment mechanism. Based on UTAUT theory, this study uses statistics, structural equation modeling, and mediating effect analysis to construct a theoretical model of the influencing factors of users’ payment behavior of knowledge payment platform from the user level, knowledge-provider level, and platform level. The findings show that content quality, peer influence, KOL influence, perceived interaction, effort expectation, and perceived trust significantly affect users’ willingness-to-pay and have an indirect effect on users’ paying behavior through their willingness-to-pay. Perceived cost, perceived interaction, content quality, peer influence, performance expectation, and effort expectation directly and significantly affect user paying behavior. By regulating the above elements, the improvement of customer attraction ability of online knowledge platforms can be realized.
Highlights
Paid knowledge is a new industry derived from Internet content consumption [1], with its native industries coming from the education, consulting, and publishing industries.With the popularity of the Internet and the advent of the era of cognitive redundancy, these industries have proliferated on the Internet’s express train, eventually giving rise to a series of paid courses, paid channels, paid quizzes, paid communities, and other paid knowledge products [2]
Paying for knowledge allows the recipient of knowledge to pay the disseminators and screeners of knowledge indirectly, rather than allowing those involved in the knowledge distribution chain to receive revenue through other means such as traffic or advertising [4]
Online knowledge payment platforms are still relatively small compared to the offline knowledge industry and cultural communication industry, and the current short-term leapfrogging growth of the industry is mainly dependent on the favorable support of the internet industry, even taking advantage of the stagnation period of the knowledge industry brought about by the epidemic crisis
Summary
Perceived cost, perceived interaction, content quality, peer influence, performance expectation, and effort expectation directly and significantly affect user paying behavior. By regulating the above elements, the improvement of customer attraction ability of online knowledge platforms can be realized. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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