Jeon, Doh-Shin and Yan, Jun (2020) Data, Targeted Advertising and Quality of Journalism: The Case of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). TSE Working Paper, n. 20-1171, Toulouse

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Abstract

This paper studies how newspapers’ adoption of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP), a publishing format for mobile devices enabling instant loading of web pages, changes data allocation and thereby newspapers’ incentive to invest in quality of journalism when consumer data is used for targeted advertising. The adoption of AMP allows Google to obtain consumer data from AMP articles and to combine it with other sources of consumer data to improve targeting of the advertisements served by Google on other websites. Even if such data combination increases static efficiency, it can reduce dynamic efficiency when it lowers the ad revenue per newspaper traffic and thereby reduces the quality of journalism. Newspapers face a collective action problem as a newspaper’s adoption of AMP generates negative externalities to other newspapers through data leakage. In addition to leveraging its search monopoly power, Google can use a divide-and-conquer strategy to induce newspapers to adopt AMP. We provide policy remedies.