“…But due to the crisis affecting the media industry worldwide (Pew Research Center, ; Newman et al, ), business criteria tend to dominate journalistic decisions. As a consequence, news sites rarely link to external competitors: They treat links not as journalistic objects that add value to the stories, but as economic assets or functional devices that can, in principle, keep audiences within corporate boundaries (Dimitrova, Connolly‐Ahern, Williams, Kaid, & Reid, ; Karlsson, Clerwall, & Örnebring, ). The “link tax” that motivates this study, and the lobbying efforts that underlie its political sponsorship, are a good example of how business criteria dominate journalistic decisions – and of how the industry is trying to monetize emerging patterns of news consumption.…”