Social Media and the News Industry

The growing influence of internet platforms acting as content aggregators is one of the most important challenges facing the media industry. We develop a parsimonious model to understand the impact of content bundling by a social platform. In our model consumers can access news either directly through a newspaper's website, or indirectly through a platform, which also offers social content. Even though the platform shares revenues with newspapers whose content it publishes, content bundling harms newspapers. Its effect on news quality and news consumption depends on the media market structure and on whether the platform can personalize the content bundle.