Forbidden fruit or soured grapes? Long-term effects of the temporary unavailability and rationing of US news websites on their consumption from the European Union

Neil Thurman, James Sly, Bartosz Wilczek and Richard Fletcher

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In May 2018, hundreds of websites located outside the European Union (EU), including USAToday.com, became completely or partially unavailable to EU citizens as a number of publishers decided to comply with an EU data protection regulation (GDPR) by blocking access. Several of the sites that started to exclude EU users continued to do so for months or years, even though some of their competitors, like the New York Times, never adopted a policy of exclusion. These differing strategies allowed us to conduct a quasi-experimental study on the effects of temporary product unavailability and temporary rationing. We find that both temporary product withdrawal and temporary rationing can have long-term effects. In our case, monthly unique visitors in the months and even years after full access was restored were between 44% and 61% lower than they had been before the restrictions were imposed, with a wider market contraction explaining only part of these falls. We also find distinct differences between the effects of temporarily rationing and temporarily withdrawing websites. Although both strategies lead to a long-term loss in visitors, rationing appears to increase a website's desirability for some consumers. After rationing was lifted, USAToday.com's reduced audience consumed the title more deeply and frequently than had been the case before rationing was imposed.

Keywords: General Data Protection Regulation; lock-in; product availability; rationing; restricted availability; status quo bias; switching costs; transnational news audiences; unavailability; website consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 D21 D22 D45 H3 K20 K33 L82 M15 M38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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Published in International Communication Gazette 7-8.84(2022): pp. 698-720

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:116909

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