Transforming Fans into Profit: Popular IDs’ Advertising on Weibo

Sina Weibo, the largest microblog platform in China, has explored an innovative profit channel: to utilize the popular microbloggers (have more than one million fans) to post advertising information. This paper adopts an interpersonal perspective to study this social-networking advertising form. Basing on the expectancy violation theory, the author investigates how the fans of the popular microbloggers evaluate and react to advertising information through an experiment. Results of the experiment indicate that the fans celebrity worship degree has significant influence on their acceptance of the advertising on the celebrity microbloggers; the attitudes and reactions of the fans fit the expectancy violation theory prediction well. These findings extend the utilization of the expectancy violation theory to the parasocial relationship between fans and celebrity on microblog. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.