A study of the paying behavior for subscribing social network sites

This paper adopted a decomposed theory of planned behavior as the research framework to study users’ behavior of paying subscriptions for a social network site. An online survey was conducted of the users of a popular social network site in Taiwan. Two factors, experience level, and financial resources, were hypothesized to test whether these factors would moderate the relationship between paying intention and real paying behavior. Partial Least Square was used and the results of 577 effective samples provided evidence for our model with all of the causal effects supported. A strong connection between paying intention and paying behavior was found. The two moderating factors, experience level and financial resources, were found to be significant. Users with tenure of more than six months and strong financial resources are more likely to pay for subscriptions than those with tenure of less than three months and weak financial resources. Other factors including age, gender, education, usage frequency of the social network site, and duration on the social network site per visit, were also tested for their moderating effect on the paying intention and paying behavior of users, but the results were all insignificant. The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are identified and discussed.