The Effect of Links and Excerpts on Internet News Consumption
研究了新闻网站提供外部链接和摘要对消费者浏览行为的影响，发现链接增加了新闻消费，尤其对浏览较少的消费者效果更明显，且对链接方和被链接方都有益。
Internet news and search sites often excerpt content from and link to competing news outlets. On the one hand, providing outbound links can make the linking site more attractive, even to the point of stealing traffic from the linked sites. Regulatory policy, such as the European Union’s Copyright Directive Article 15 taxing links, is predicated in part on this idea. On the other hand, receiving inbound links can increase a linked site’s audience by informing readers about its news content that day. To explore these opposing perspectives, the authors develop a dynamic learning model and fit it to browsing and link data from celebrity news sites. They then simulate how banning links affects consumer browsing and find that linking increases celebrity news consumption, especially among consumers who browse the least. On average, linking benefits both the linking and linked sites. The authors estimate that exposure to a link increases the likelihood of visiting the linked site by .14%. This increase is approximately three times the commonly reported click-through rate for paid display advertisements.