An Empirical Research on the Effect of Free Knowledge in the Knowledge Payment Platform

With the advent of the era of knowledge payment, more and more online knowledge platforms are starting to offer knowledge that is paid for. This paper studies the effects of free knowledge on the number of purchase of paid knowledge from the perspective of content carrier platform. We collect the real data about free and paid knowledge from the largest Q&A platform in China. Then the hierarchical regression models are used to analyze the effects of the popularity of free knowledge on paid knowledge. We also examine the moderating effects of type and price of paid knowledge. The results of our study show that the number of questions and most relevant content of free knowledge have significant effects on the number of purchase of paid knowledge. Paid knowledge of audio type is more affected by the number of questions and most relevant content of free knowledge than paid knowledge of video type. And the price of paid knowledge strengthens the negative effect of most relevant content of free knowledge on it. The experiments are based on real-world large-scale data sets, providing data-driven decision support for the management of free and paid knowledge in online knowledge platforms.