Does cost matter: How customer adopts the fee-based online content services?

As Internet usage widely grows, online content services such as newspaper, magazine, music, game and movie are provided with a fee-based subscription. Many content services providers consider charging a usage fee into its service provisions as one of the Internet business models for increasing revenue. There are customer resistances to adopting the fee-based service provision on the Web. Previous research in information systems (IS)has focused on the analysis of adoption of information technology or systems in the individual ororganization level. No principle research has been carried out on the user adoption behavior of online content services provisions. As users actively access content services on the Web, it needs to explore user adoption behavior in different settings. Many IS researcher have employedquantitative approaches, even though they deal with the process of user behavior regarding the information technology or system. In this study, we attempt to discover how customers adopt the fee-based provision of online content services by employing grounded theory, one of the principal qualitative research methods.