آیا مصرف کنندگان رسانه واقعا تبلیغات را دوست ندارند؟ ارزیابی تجربی نقش تبلیغات در بازار رسانه های مکتوب

This paper uses data on German consumer magazines observed between 1992 and 2004 to analyze the extent to which consumers (dis-)like advertising. We estimate logit demand models separately for the six most important magazine segments in terms of circulation. We find little evidence for readers disliking advertising. On the contrary, we show that readers in many magazine segments appreciate advertising. Readers of Women's magazines, Business and politics magazines as well as Car magazines — market segments where advertisements are relatively more informative — appreciate advertising while advertising is nuisance to readers of Adult magazines, a segment where advertisements are particularly uninformative. Demand for interior design magazines is not well identified. Our logit demand estimates are confirmed by logit demand models with random coefficients and by magazine-specific monopoly demand models.

The economics of two-sided markets have recently caught the attention of many economists. Such markets have the property that there are two distinct types of users, each of which wishes to interact on a common platform. A prototypical example for a two-sided market is the media industry, as first explicitly noticed by Sonnac (2000). Media content producers need to attract two types of consumers: advertisers who value the medium more the more consumers it reaches and consumers who have a (dis-) taste for advertising. This interdependency creates network effects whose consequences for pricing, efficiency and information supply is in the focus of a rapidly growing body of theoretical papers. Most contributions — for example Anderson (2005), Anderson and Coate (2005), Ambrus and Reisinger (2005), Choi (2006), Crampes et al. (2004), Gabszewics et al. (2004), Kind et al. (2003), Kohlschein (2004), Kremhelmer and Zenger (2004), Peitz and Valetti (2008), Nilssen and Sørgard (2003) and Reisinger (2004) — assume that consumers dislike advertising. Exceptions are Häckner and Nyberg (2000), who assume that readers like advertising in a print media context, and Sonnac (2000), who considers feedbacks from advertising to circulation under the two alternative assumptions of consumer advertising aversion and advertising appreciation.

The body of theoretical literature on the economics of two-sided markets is sizeable and steadily growing. A large fraction of that literature considers media markets since they constitute a prototypical example of a two-sided market. However, most scholars assume that media consumers dislike advertising. We empirically test this assumption on German magazine data. We use a discrete choice demand model in an oligopolistic setting to estimate the utility function of magazine consumption. We treat both price and advertising share as endogenous variables and use magazine characteristics in other segments as instruments. We show that consumers mostly appreciate advertising in magazines. Consumers of TV and Women's magazines appreciate advertising most, followed by those in the Car and the Business and politics magazine segments. Consumers of Adult magazines are indifferent. These differences across magazine segments may be due to demand-side effects — consumer heterogeneity across segments — and supply-side effects — consumers appear to be appreciating advertisements more in segments where advertisements are more informative. The latter hypothesis is confirmed by our data while the former cannot be tested with the data we have at our disposal.