From Free to Paid: Public Attitude Change and Mechanism Evidence around Doubao's Charging Announcement
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: As generative AI moves from free access to paid subscription, how charging shapes public attitude bears on platform commercialization. Taking Doubao's monthly subscription as the setting, this paper builds a dual-path framework of “product experience - price perception”. Using the announcement date (May 4, 2026) as the breakpoint, we collect public Weibo discussions from 30 days before to 30 days after it (2-day periods; the 14 days on each side form the main window), measure attitude with aspect-based sentiment analysis, and test changes at the breakpoint by regression discontinuity in time. Negative evaluation is robust in direction for Payment Willingness (τ = +0.751, p < 0.001) and Corporate Brand (τ = +0.647, p = 0.011), but rests on only 27 and 7 pre-breakpoint texts, so the magnitudes are read as direction only. The negative share for Price & Charging shows no significant increase (τ = -0.161, p = 0.123), so the price-fairness path is not supported. The difference between the two aspect jumps is -0.532 (clustered SE 0.437, p = 0.245), opposite to expectation and underpowered given the small pre-breakpoint sample; we report only that no larger negative change was found for the price path than for the feature path. The overall negative share rises by 0.317 (p = 0.041) but depends on a pre-breakpoint period with 3 relevant texts and falls to 0.043 (p = 0.517) without it, so it is not robustly supported. The conclusions are limited to a marked change in attitude, with no persistent shift and no strict causal claim.
Source: Media studies.
Author: Rui Zhang
Institution: Zhejiang Yuexiu University
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7224756431