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The rise of news aggregator sites is a notable phenomenon in the contemporary media landscape. Outperforming traditional news outlets, online news aggregators, such as Yahoo News, Google News, and the Huffington Post, have become major sources of news for American audiences. Facing economic hardships, some news organizations cast blame on news aggregators for stealing their content and audiences. However, the relationship between news aggregators and traditional media outlets on the demand side has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Through a national survey of 1,143 U.S. Internet users, this study integrates the uses and gratifications paradigm and an economic approach to predict aggregator consumption and examine market competition. In terms of consumption, among demographic factors, age and ethnicity are the two major predictors of aggregator use. Among psychological factors, opinion motivations is the only non-predictor of aggregator use, suggesting that users do not seek opinion-driven content when they visit aggregator sites. In terms of competition, this study uncovers non-competitive relationships between three major news aggregators and 13 major TV, print, and social media news outlets. Such findings are at odds with industry sentiment and the proposed model serves as a basis for further theorizing news aggregator consumption.
Lee et al. (Fri,) studied this question.