Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments December 1, 2018 erstellt
Description:
The impact of aggregators on news outlets is ambiguous. In particular, the existing theoreticalliterature highlights that although aggregators create a market expansion effect when they bringvisitors to news outlets, they also generate a substitution effect if some visitors switch from thenews outlets to the aggregators. Using the shutdown of the Spanish edition of Google News inDecember of 2014 and difference-in-differences methodology, this paper empirically examinesthe relevance of these two effects. We show the shutdown of Google News in Spain decreasedthe number of daily visits to Spanish news outlets between 8% and 14%, and that this effect waslarger in outlets with less overall daily visits and a lower share of international visitors. We alsofind evidence suggesting that the shutdown decreased online advertisement revenues andadvertising intensity at news outlets. We then analyze the effect of the opt-in policy adopted bythe German edition of Google News in October of 2014. Although such policy did notsignificantly affect the daily visits of all outlets that opted out, it reduced by 8% the number ofvisits of the outlets controlled by the publisher Axel Springer. Our results demonstrate theexistence of a net market-expansion effect through which news aggregators increase consumers'awareness of news outlets' contents, thereby increasing their number of visits