Athey, Mobius and Pal (2017)
Contents
Source Details
| Athey, Mobius and Pal (2017) | |
| Title: | The Impact of Aggregators on Internet News Consumption |
| Author(s): | Athey, S., Mobius, M., Pal, J. |
| Year: | 2017 |
| Citation: | Athey, S., Mobius, M. M., & Pál, J. (2017). The Impact of Aggregators on Internet News Consumption. |
| Link(s): | Definitive , Open Access |
| Key Related Studies: | |
| Discipline: | |
| Linked by: | |
| About the Data | |
| Data Description: | The authors state:
"In this paper, we use the shutdown of Google News in Spain as a natural experiment to evaluate how news aggregators affect news consumption. Our dataset is a sample of all browsing events for more than 100,000 users in Spain who use Microsoft products for browsing the internet andhaveoptedintoallowingtheirdatatobeusedforresearchpurposes.4 Weuse this dataset to construct quasi-experimental treatment and control groups. Our treatment users are all Google News users. We match these users with a synthetic control group of non-Google News users who have the same news consumption patterns as the corresponding Google News users after the shutdown of Google News. Our matching procedure therefore selects control users who make the same consumption decisions in the absence of Google News (when both groups have access to the same news discovery technology) and therefore have the same underlying preferences. |
| Data Type: | Primary data |
| Secondary Data Sources: | |
| Data Collection Methods: | |
| Data Analysis Methods: | |
| Industry(ies): | |
| Country(ies): | |
| Cross Country Study?: | No |
| Comparative Study?: | No |
| Literature review?: | No |
| Government or policy study?: | No |
| Time Period(s) of Collection: |
|
| Funder(s): |
|
Abstract
A policy debate centers around the question whether news aggregators such as Google News decrease or increase traffic to online news sites. One side of the debate, typically espoused by publishers, views aggregators as substitutes for traditional news consumption because aggregators’ landing pages provide snippets of news stories and therefore reduce the incentive to click on the linked articles. Defendants of aggregators, on the other hand, view aggregators as complements because they make it easier to discover news and therefore drive traffic to publishers. This debate has received particular attention in the European Union where two countries, Germany and Spain, enacted copyright reforms that allow newspapers to charge aggregators for linking to news snippets. In this paper, we use Spain as a natural experiment because Google News shut down all together in response to the reform in December 2014. We compare the news consumption of a large number of Google News users with a synthetic control group of similar non-Google News users. We find that the shutdown of Google News reduces overall news consumption by about 20% for treatment users, and it reduces page views on publishers other than Google News by 10%. This decrease is concentrated around small publishers while large publishers do not see significant changes in their overall traffic. We further find that when Google News shuts down, its users are able to replace some but not all of the types of news they previously read. Post-shutdown, they read less breaking news, hard news, and news that is not well covered on their favorite news publishers. These news categories explain most of the overall reduction in news consumption, and shed light on the mechanisms through which aggregators interact with traditional publishers.
Main Results of the Study
Policy Implications as Stated By Author
Coverage of Study
Datasets
| Sample size: | 100000 |
| Level of aggregation: | Microsoft users |
| Period of material under study: | 2014, 2016 |
