Data Exchanges in Mobile News Apps

This paper maps the flows of data to and from third-party actors when users access content in mobile news apps. This way, it analyzes the strategic networks of collaboration and data exchange that news organizations engage in in the digital economy, expanding the traditional two-sided model of media economics (centered around sales to audiences and advertisers) to also account for what happens “behind the curtain”. Research already shows that the trade with data constitutes a central component of web-based business models (Evens & Van Damme, 2016; Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Lindskow, 2016), but no systematic scrutiny of the same phenomenon exists with regards to mobile news use even though the use of mobile platforms for news accessing increases these years (Newman, Levy, & Nielsen, 2015). This study measures all calls made by the news apps upon accessing content, mapping which third-party actors get data from the app use. It compares central news apps across six Western democracies (Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, the UK, and the USA) in order to examine whether media-systemic features (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) and privacy legislation influences data exchanges.