engleski

The Digital Advertising Gap: A Proposal for Measuring the Impact of Digital Intermediaries on Media Pluralism

This paper looks at the digital advertising gap, or the difference between the total amount of publicly declared internet advertising spending by companies based in Croatia, and the data on total income of registered digital news companies in Croatia. The assessment is primarily based on the 2017 case study of the digital news media market that combines multiple data sources: financial indicators provided by the main regulatory body (AEM) and the main digital advertising association (HURA), focus groups and semi-structured interviews with representatives of digital news media and major advertising companies in Croatia (N = 15), and an online survey (N = 2000). The data shows a discrepancy between the total internet advertising investment, and the total digital media income. The case study shows that digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook, which are simultaneously the most visited websites in Croatia and essential access points for digital news, are the final destinations for the majority of digital advertising investments. At the same time, our data shows low trust in digital news media and the quality of produced content, despite frequent and high usage of digital news sources. We argue that the digital advertising gap provides a clear example of a ‘market failure’ (Pickard, 2013 ; 2016) in which the market does not efficiently produce and allocate public goods. In other words, a de-regulated digital media market is unable to ensure media pluralism in the face of competition with globally dominant digital intermediaries. We propose to measure their impact by looking at five key variables: (1) internet advertising investments ; (2) income of digital news media ; (3) the state of journalistic profession and the commercial influence over editorial content ; (4) users’ perception of the quality of digital news content ; and (5) citizens' trust in digital news media. Such measurements should be tested cross-nationally to determine the effects of the digital advertising gap on digital media pluralism in different national contexts.

Digital advertising gap, digital intermediaries, digital news media, digital news market, market failure, media pluralism

nije evidentirano