Social media and the news: attention capture via content bundling

Abstract

The growing influence of internet platforms acting as content aggregators is one of the most important challenges facing the media industry. We develop a simple 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 depends on the cost of providing quality and on the media market structure.