Do Search Engines Increase Concentration in Media Markets?

Joan Calzada, Nestor Duch-Brown and Ricard Gil
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Néstor Duch Brown

No 10671, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Search engines are important access channels to news content of traditional newspapers with Google alone responsible for 35% of online visits to news outlets in the European Union. Yet, the effects of Google Search on market competition and information diversity have received scant attention. Using daily traffic data for 606 news outlets from 15 European countries, we analyze Google’s capacity to influence organic search visits by exploiting exogenous variation in news outlets’ indexation caused by nine core algorithm updates rolled out by Google between 2018 and 2020. We find Google core updates overall reduced the number of keywords (queries) for which news outlets occupy one of the top 10 organic search results positions. Therefore, given the positive impact that the number of top keywords have on traffic this led to the decrease in the overall number of news outlets’ visits. Finally, when studying the impact of Google core updates on media market concentration, we find the three “big” core updates identified in this period reduced market concentration by 1%, but this effect was offset by the rest of the updates. Similarly, in the context of Spain, we find the three “big” core updates reduced monthly keyword concentration by 4%.

Keywords: search engines; market concentration Google; news sites; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L50 L82 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-com, nep-cul, nep-eec, nep-pay and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10671.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do search engines increase concentration in media markets? (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10671

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().