Members' Expected Benefit,Behavior And Sense Of Virtual Community

With the release of document No.46 in 2015,hot money flows into the sports industry,contributing to asset bubbles and rising inflation.Three years after,as the market turns cold,the buyers find themselves difficult to retain customer and face severe financial pressure.Hupu is the largest virtual sports community in China.It does not commit for sports broadcast right.Its success has roots in solid community culture.Users are the core of the online sports media operation,and keeping enough active users is the foundation of the sports website in order to remain competitive.In this paper,taking Hupu for example,the author aims to explore the relationship between domestic virtual sports community members' expected benefits,actions and consequently the sense of virtual community.This would be essential to understand user needs,enhance user participation and provide valuable suggestions for internet sports media.The paper studies Hupu Members' expected benefits,actions and sense of virtual community with a sample of 222 users by a questionnaire survey method.Based on the earlier research works,we categorize Hupu users' main expected benefits into four groups: cognitive benefit,hedonic benefit,social integrative benefit and personal integrative benefit.The results of regression analysis and structural equation model prove that,except for the irrelevance between cognitive benefit and production,other expected benefits have significantly positive effects to the behavior of the members,and different expected benefits have different degrees of influence to the member behavior.Also,the research shows that all three different member behaviors have positive impacts on the development of the sense of virtual community;while different member behaviors also have different degrees of influence to the sense of virtual community.