Data, Targeted Advertising and Quality of Journalism: The Case of Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)

Abstract

This paper studies how newspapers’ adoption of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which is a publishing format that enables instant loading of web pages in mobile browsers, changes data allocation and thereby newspapers’ incentive to invest in quality journalism when consumer data are 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 the 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, thereby reducing the quality of journalism. Newspapers face a collective action problem as a newspaper’s adoption of AMP generates negative externalities to other newspapers through search ranking and data leakage. By leveraging its market power in search and ad intermediation, Google can induce newspapers to adopt AMP. We provide policy remedies which eliminate the externalities. Our remedies are relevant to current regulatory interventions to make Google pay for displaying newspapers’ content.

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Reference

Doh-Shin Jeon, and Jun Yan, “Data, Targeted Advertising and Quality of Journalism: The Case of Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)”, TSE Working Paper, n. 20-1171, December 2020, revised April 2022.