Motivation for Consumption of Collegiate Athletics Subscription Web Sites

Abstract

The growth of the Web has had a tremendous impact on how information is disseminated and shared about sports. Research has shown that consumers use media to satisfy a variety of needs and desires, has examined online sport media consumption, and the use of online sport media. But there has been no examination of the motivating factors behind subscription based online media, in particular, paid content sites and message boards. This study explored the relationships of motives, perceived value, and hours in usage per week. Five motives were verified through a confirmatory factor analysis. An examination of the usage characteristics of the respondents demonstrates a loyal and active user. This is important for the site administrators in that the subscribers are using the site as a “go to” destination and not merely something to peruse during their leisure time. The site is acting as an entry point onto the Web.

Exploring motivations, constraints, and perceptions toward sport consumers' smartphone usage.

“…To their credit, researchers have examined sport consumption behaviors using the Internet (Hardin, Koo, Ruihley, Dittmore, & McGreevey, 2012;Hur, Ko, & Claussen, 2011a;Hur et al, 2012;Hur, Ko, & Valacich, 2007;Hur, Ko, & Valacich, 2011b;Seo & Green, 2008), social media (Clavio & Kian, 2010;Clavio & Walsh, 2013;Hambrick & Mahoney, 2011;Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh, & Greenwell, 2010;Witkemper, Lim, & Waldburger, 2012), fantasy sports (Dwyer & Kim, 2011), and smartphones (Ha, Kang, & Ha, in press; Kang, Ha, & Hambrick, in press). …”

“…The results revealed the 10 dimensions had acceptable levels of Cronbach's alphas ranging from .77 to .90 and reported a positive correlation with users' web commitment, which established further validity. To date, various studies have either fully or partially adopted MSSOC in studies examining other types of websites (Hardin et al, 2012;Hur et al, 2011a) and mediums (Dwyer & Kim, 2011;Hambrick & Mahoney, 2011) related to sport consumption. The studies that employed the MSSOC exemplify its adoptability for other mediums as well as studies relevant for sport consumption.…”

“…The studies that employed the MSSOC exemplify its adoptability for other mediums as well as studies relevant for sport consumption. Hardin et al (2012) examined the relationship of motivations, perceived value, and usage for website subscriptions by employing the MSSOC. The data were collected from the Rivals.com network that had 7,100 subscribers.…”

“…Previous studies that examined technology consumption behavior in sport focused on identifying reasons for fans to use technology (Dwyer & Kim, 2011;Hardin et al, 2012;Hur et al, 2007;2011a;2011b;Seo & Green, 2008;Witkemper et al, 2012). However, as mentioned previously, not all sport fans are alike (Sutton et al, 1993), and by taking that into consideration, gaps in the literature exist in terms of determining how fan identification contributes to fans' sport consumption behavior using the newest technology.…”

“…When examining the technology use of sport consumers, various studies often employed a purposive sampling method to select participants who meet their proposed inclusion criteria (e.g., Clavio & Walsh, 2013;Hardin et al, 2012;Hur et al, 2007;2011a;2011b;Witkemper, et al, 2012). For example, Clavio and Walsh (2013) (2011) surveyed MTurk workers to understand how they used their smartphone for job purposes.…”