Analysis of Factors Affecting User Loyalty in an Online Discussion Forum

PT XYZ is an internet company, providing free online discussion forum as the main service with a display of advertisements as a primary source of revenue. Users are one of the most important assets for PT XYZ. Every user who visits a discussion forum will be exposed with advertisements in the forum which will contribute to the business revenue of PT XYZ. Unfortunately, in the past six years, the number of users has been decreased by 64%, which surely affecting PT XYZ’s business profits. Therefore, user loyalty is a key aspect that needs to be underlined. The focus of this study is to analyze factors that affect user loyalty in the online discussion forum of PT XYZ. Factors that directly affect user loyalty consist of perceived usefulness, user attitude response, user relationship quality, and user satisfaction. While the indirect factors consist of social influence, ease of use, product design, quality of argument, the credibility of sources, information, social exchange, and recreation. This study is a quantitative research with a structural equation model (SEM) approach. The results show that user loyalty is affected by factors of relationship quality between online discussion forum PT XYZ and users, which directly affected by argument quality, and also source credibility.