by Pedro Chirinos Terrones | Jan 24, 2023 | Commentary |
Imagine you are navigating on a specific social media and, suddenly, you see a post from a page you’re following with this attractive headline: “We have all the specifics of the new chapter of this series!”. Turns out that that is one of your favorite series and you want to have a heads-up about this chapter, so you click on the link, which will take you to their website…but turns out there is no information about the new chapter of your series, and only provides you with basic information regarding the series, and finishes with “the new chapter will be aired soon”. This may be just a waste of time for you, but underneath there is more. The phenomenon previously described is called clickbait, which refers to “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page”. This has an important economic implication and should be addressed as an unfair competition practice. I will cover the basic economics of websites as internet platforms, the notions of bait advertising according to the FTC, and how these particular headlines can be qualified as such. Internet websites have become media platforms that have two types of consumers: on one side, we have the ones who are willing to access the website because of the content it has (the “content consumers”), and on the other side, advertisers that want to address their products or services to the first type of consumers, and are willing to pay the platform for their space. Whenever this characteristic appears, the notion of two-sided markets arises. Two-sided...
