What Do News Aggregators Do? Evidence from Google News in Spain and Germany

Abstract

The impact of aggregators on news outlets is ambiguous. In particular, the existing theoretical
literature highlights that although aggregators create a market expansion effect when they bring
visitors to news outlets, they also generate a substitution effect if some visitors switch from the
news outlets to the aggregators. Using the shutdown of the Spanish edition of Google News in
December of 2014 and difference-in-differences methodology, this paper empirically examines
the relevance of these two effects. We show the shutdown of Google News in Spain decreased
the number of daily visits to Spanish news outlets between 8% and 14%, and that this effect was
larger in outlets with less overall daily visits and a lower share of international visitors. We also
find evidence suggesting that the shutdown decreased online advertisement revenues and
advertising intensity at news outlets. We then analyze the effect of the opt-in policy adopted by
the German edition of Google News in October of 2014. Although such policy did not
significantly affect the daily visits of all outlets that opted out, it reduced by 8% the number of
visits of the outlets controlled by the publisher Axel Springer. Our results demonstrate the
existence of a net market-expansion effect through which news aggregators increase consumers'
awareness of news outlets' contents, thereby increasing their number of visits.

Keywords: News Aggregator, Google, Engagement Metrics, Daily Visits, Market-Expansion Effect, Substitution Effect

JEL Classification: L86