Anna Kerkhof, doctoral student at the Chair of Media Economics, was awarded the renowned Reinhard Selten Prize for her work "Advertising and Content Differentiation: Evidence from YouTube" at this year's annual conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik. Anually the Verein für Socialpolitik awards the Reinhard Selten Prize for papers that stand out in particular for their originality, the importance of the research question and clean methodology.
The award-winning paper examines the impact that advertisement-based business models of online media platforms have on the media content provided. With the help of YouTube data, the author shows that an increase in permissible advertising breaks in YouTube videos leads to more differentiated content. The study is among the first to identify empirical evidence of a positive effect of advertising finance on the diversity of media content. It thus makes an important contribution to the debate on how content diversity can be guaranteed in ( digitalised) media markets.