Preference Externalities in Media Markets

The Impact of Time Shifting on TV Consumption and Ad Viewership

“…Therefore, we find no evidence that time shifting changes the concentration of live viewership but it increases the concentration of total TV viewership because it is disproportionately used to watch the more popular content. The increase in the concentration of TV viewership may have significant impact on the production of content through preference externalities (Anderson and Waldfogel 2015). Our results show that niche content attracts fewer households with time shifting, which may reduce the revenue that this content generates.…”

Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues

“…Effect on "Quality".-Two features of newspapers have been repeatedly used in the literature as measures of newspaper quality (or at least production of journalistic-intensive content): the number of journalists and the so-called newshole (the amount of space in the newspaper devoted to anything but advertising) (see, e.g., Hamilton 2006;Berry and Waldfogel 2010;Fan 2013;Cagé 2017;Cagé, Hervé, and Viaud 2017). 51 Anderson and Waldfogel (2015) for instance note that "(i)n newspapers, some of the direct input cost measures-page length and staff size-are directly suggestive of quality." Table 5 presents estimates of the impact of the shock on these two measures, as well as on the average payroll and the total number of pages.…”

The Digital Transformation of News Media and the Rise of Disinformation and Fake News

“…Revenue has substantially declined with digitization, almost entirely due to a decline in commercial and classified advertising revenue while subscription revenue remains more or less constant, with the vast majority still linked to paper subscriptions 42 . The net effect of a combined strong decline in revenue and a small decline in fixed cost should be more market exit than entry (Anderson & Waldfogel, 2016). The statistics point in that direction.…”

“…Even in linear radio and TV news broadcasting, news came as a bundled time series of items, often with all news channels broadcasting at the same time (hour) so that consumers could not switch between broadcasters. Still there were "preference" externalities in printed news (Anderson & Waldfogel, 2016). First, bundling of articles may be a source of negative externalities.…”