Many online news publishers finance their websites by displaying banner ads alongside content. Such display of ads is generally perceived as undesirable by readers. But does it also harm their news consumption? That is an important question because reading high quality political and economic news contributes to many socially desirable outcomes such as shaping voters’ political attitudes, informing investors’ financial expectations, and increasing readers’ health-related awareness. Well-informed citizens are essential to a functioning society.
“… ad exposure led to a 20% decrease in the number of articles views and a 10% decrease in the number of news categories consumed.”
With colleagues Shunyao Yan and Bernd Skiera from Goethe University Frankfurt, I set out to answer this question by examining the impact of ads on news consumption in a real-world setting. We looked at 3.1 million anonymized browsing sessions from 79,856 users of a news website, some of whom had adopted an ad blocker. We compared the news-reading behavior of those who blocked ads with those who did not, essentially by examining how their news reading behavior changes before and after they blocked ads in what is called a “difference-in-differences” approach. The full empirical study and its results are available on…
