Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía. Edificio Los Madroños, 2ª planta (ECON-2026)

Ponente: Ricard Gil (Queen’s University)

Título: News Consumption, Multi-homing, and Advertising Strategies (trabajo conjunto con Joan Calzada)
 

Abstract: This paper empirically examines the causal impact of multi-homing of news consumers on advertisers’ strategies. Using variation in the deployment of broadband internet across Spanish provinces as a plausible source of exogenous variation, we first document and examine how access to internet increases readers’ multi-homing. Then, we leverage the exogenous increases in multi-homing to examine changes in advertising strategies at the advertiser level. Our findings show that the spread of Internet has favored the migration of readers from the print to the digital news outlets and has transformed the reading habits of consumers by increasing the percentage of news readers multi-home in print and digital outlets. Regarding the advertising market, we find that both the internet penetration and multi-homing have reduced the number of advertisers that use print outlets and their spending, the impact being most negative on regional outlets. So far as online press is concerned, internet penetration and multi-homing have increased advertisers’ spending, but less so for regional outlets. Overall, our results suggest that the readers’ transition from print to online media has been overall harmful for print media, and especially harmful for regional print newspapers.