Estimating the Effect of Paywalls in Media Economics: An Application of Empirical IO, Machine Learning, and NLP Methods

Date
2020-04-15
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Abstract

Media firms such as newspapers compete in a two-sided market, one between content providers and news consumers while the other between content providers and advertisers. I examine the impact of online subscription and advertisement revenues on newspapers' endogenous content choice. An analytical model demonstrates that switching from a subscription to advertising revenue model changes firms' horizontally differentiated content choice. Additionally, I provide an empirical analysis of U.S. digital newspapers and evaluate a structural model of supply and demand. An application of web scraping, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Machine Learning for data collection and data analysis is presented. The counterfactual estimation suggests that a subscription-based model improves firms' profits.

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Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Type
Thesis
Keywords
Media Economics, Industrial Organization, advertising, structural model, big data, text analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP), neural networks, support vector machine (SVM), topic modeling
Citation

Ngo, Van Thi Tuong. "Estimating the Effect of Paywalls in Media Economics: An Application of Empirical IO, Machine Learning, and NLP Methods." (2020) Diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/108331.

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