Advertiser Competition and Gatekeeping in Ad-Funded Media

Martin Peitz, Anton Sobolev () and Paul Wegener ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: Advertisers place ads on publishers’ websites to attract the attention of multihoming consumers. Because of competition in the product market, advertisers may have an incentive to partially or fully foreclose their rivals. A gatekeeper may be able to limit publishers’ access to some of the consumers. We fully characterize the equilibrium in which the gatekeeper, publishers, and advertisers make strategic pricing decisions. We show how the presence of the gatekeeper affects the advertisers’ foreclosure decisions and the surplus of the different market participants.

Keywords: gatekeeper; ad-funded media; advertiser competition; ad blocking; uniform pricing; foreclosure; imperfect competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L12 L13 L15 M37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57
Date: 2026-02
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