The Spillover Effect of Content Marketing on Free Knowledge Sharing Behavior
The knowledge sharing platform has launched content marketing,in an attempt to create a new knowledge sharing scenario that combines free and paid services.Free knowledge sharing is the foundation of knowledge sharing platforms'sus-tainable development.Therefore,it is worth pondering whether content marketing will unexpectedly affect the original free knowledge sharing behavior.While the existing literature has explored the unexpected effects of the economic incentive strategies of Zhihu Live and paid consultation on free knowledge sharing behavior,it is not yet known how content marketing as a new type of economic incentive strategy in knowledge sharing platforms affects knowledge producers'free knowledge sharing behaviors.This study uses the quasi-natural experiment of Zhihu's launch of the"good things recommendation"strategy,based on motivation crowding theory,to explore the spillover effect of content marketing on the quantity and effort of free knowledge sharing among knowledge producers,and to examine the heterogeneous impact of content marketing on knowledge producers with different reputations.This study uses text analytics to conduct fine-grained mining on the answer content,using answer length,topic diversity,relevance of answers to questions,and the mean of the first three as metrics to measure the effort of free knowledge sharing.Adopting propensity score matching and the difference-in-difference methods to test the research model and hypothesis.Finally,the robustness of the results is verified by real economic incentive effect tests,parallel trend tests,avoidance of extremes,replacement of the propensity score matching method,and placebo tests.The results show that content marketing has a positive spillover effect on the quantity and effort of free knowledge shar-ing among knowledge producers,as evidenced by an increase in the number of answers,longer answer texts,more diverse an-swer topics,and greater relevance of answers to questions;Compared to knowledge producers with a high reputation,content marketing has a more substantial positive spillover effect on the quantity and effort of free knowledge sharing among know-ledge producers with a low reputation.The findings still hold after a series of robustness tests.The results provide a theoretical basis for knowledge sharing platforms to adopt content marketing,preventing platform managers from underestimating the overall benefits of content marketing.The results also help platform managers implement differentiated management strategies for heterogeneous knowledge producers,further exploiting the positive spillover effects of content marketing.Therefore,the research results have important decision-making reference value for knowledge sharing platforms improving the commercialization transformation model and creating a harmonious coexistence of free and paid knowledge sharing ecology.
content marketinggood things recommendationfree knowledge sharingmotivation crowding theoryspillover ef-fect
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