ABSTRACT

The study compares several information services offered by Internet intermediaries. The hypotheses deal with the influence of a gatekeeper’s relevance assessment service on a consumer’s decision-making. The empirical findings provide a taxonomy of decisive attribute levels and their part-worth utilities which affect consumers’ decisions. From this, media management recommendations can be derived. Some findings may be worrying for media management. For example, search engines will increase the competitive pressure on journalistic media the better they provide personalised search results. However, the results also indicate that users’ search behaviours open up a large field for media companies’ brand-driven distribution strategies. This is possible because almost half of search engines’ search queries are by brand name or media label. The weakness of media companies is revealed above all in the field of advertising. Nonetheless, media companies are still highly competitive due to their journalistic potential. In view of the research results, media industries should modify their business models in such a way that they integrate more of the superior characteristics, compared with the algorithms of well-known Internet intermediaries, into their editorial journalistic work.

摘要

该研究比较了互联网中介提供的几种信息服务。这些假设涉及看门人的相关性评估服务对消费者决策的影响。实证结果提供了决定性属性水平及其影响消费者决策的部分价值效用的分类法。由此，可以得出媒体管理建议。一些调查结果可能会让媒体管理感到担忧。例如，搜索引擎提供的个性化搜索结果越好，新闻媒体的竞争压力就会越大。然而，结果也表明，用户的搜索行为为媒体公司的品牌驱动分销策略开辟了广阔的领域。这是可能的，因为几乎一半的搜索引擎搜索查询都是按品牌名称或媒体标签进行的。媒体公司的弱点首先表现在广告领域。尽管如此，由于其新闻潜力，媒体公司仍然具有很强的竞争力。从研究结果来看，媒体行业应该调整自己的商业模式，将比知名互联网中介机构的算法更多的优势融入到他们的编辑新闻工作中。