Does Polarizing Content Pay Off?

Does Polarizing Content Pay Off?
Joint work with Klaus Miller (HEC Paris)

News media adopt different content strategies: commodifying or avoiding politically polarizing content. This study empirically examines the impact of content polarization on subscription and advertising revenue for a major European news website. Leveraging advancements in natural language processing, we develop textual measures of political polarization tailored to a multiparty political system based on parliamentary debate data. These measures assess the evolution of article-level polarization for the news website. By combining micro-level user data, we analyze consumer interactions with these polarizing articles, specifically focusing on clicking and subscribing behaviors. To mitigate the potential endogeneity of news coverage and news consumption, we employ the emergence of highly polarizing political parties as an instrumental variable. Our findings reveal complex consumer responses to polarized content: while such content notably increases page views, it paradoxically reduces subscriptions, particularly among users whose prior ideological views align with the content. This counterintuitive result challenges conventional views of confirmation bias in media consumption and highlights the complex effects of polarizing news on the interplay between subscription and advertising revenue models in the digital media landscape.

More information on Shunyao Yan can be found here

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