Abstract:
In this paper, we build a model of the news market where advertisers choose to allocate their ads between a social media platform and a news website that is the content creator. Consumers perceive ads as a nuisance but value news content. Our main objective is to evaluate a policy intervention that aims to foster news creation by redistributing revenues from social media to news websites. Such interventions, first implemented in Australia in 2021, are commonly referred to as news media bargaining codes and have been recently debated worldwide. We focus on a novel trade-off between the higher advertising efficiency of social media and the value of content creation by news websites. We find that equilibrium ad prices and profits of advertisers are non-monotonic in the value of news. Moreover, we show that a parameter region always exists where the equilibrium level of news creation is socially sub-optimal. Finally, we show that policy intervention mandated by the bargaining code is always welfare-increasing. We identify conditions when the policy even results in a Pareto improvement over laissez-faire. We find that in all other cases, the improved welfare comes at the detriment of the social media company.