Resource Exchanges Between Mobile News Apps and Third-Parties

Abstract

This article presents a longitudinal analysis of the resource exchanges between news organizations and third-parties in the use of mobile news apps. As user data constitute a critical strategic resource in the digital economy, third-party capture of user data challenges the governance of news organizations. Analyzing the prevalence and distribution of resource exchanges, the article maps connections between an international sample of mobile news apps (n = 24) and external third-parties in 2016, 2017, and 2021. Consistent with earlier studies, the analysis shows that all news organizations engage in resource exchanges, but also that while the extent varies between organizations, the extent and complexity of the general network increases over time. Furthermore, an ownership analysis of the third-parties reveals the network dominance of Google. These findings contribute to the understanding of the digital transformation of news organizations and of the digital economy of the news industry, emphasizing the network power of third-parties and discussing the organizational, democratic, and privacy-related implications of resource exchanges in the digital news industry.

Keywords:

• Digital economy
• news apps
• news industry
• resource exchanges
• third-parties
• user data

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Karina Rossing Kjær Hansen and Filip Wallberg for assistance with the data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

While this research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors, it did receive some financial support from the DECIDIS research network at the IT University of Copenhagen in 2017.

Notes

1 As Kitchin (2014) notes, however, “capta” would actually be the epistemologically correct term rather than “data” as it relates to something that has been captured.

2 These figures, as well as the ones reported below, do not take into account the strength of the edges (i.e., how many calls were made to the servers of each business partner) since the constitution of the empirical data does not allow for such analysis.

3 The 23 Google-owned third-parties found are: 1e100.net, 2mdn.net, admob.com, ampproject.org, app-measurement.net, appspot.com, crashlytics.com, doubleclick.net, firebaseio.com, google-analytics.com, google.com, google.dk, googleadservices.com, googleapis.com, googlesyndication.com, googletagmanager.com, googletagservices.com, googleusercontent.com, gstatic.com, userreport.com, youtube-nocookie.com, youtube.com, and ytimg.com.