Does pay-per-click harm journalism? New study provides evidence from a real-world newsroom

Does pay-per-click harm journalism? New study provides evidence from a real-world newsroom

Digital platforms are increasingly taking engagement metrics into account when compensating journalists and other content creators – but does this have a negative effect on pay, quality, tone or coverage?

A new studyLink opens in a new window by Dr Mateusz Stalinski (University of Warwick) and co-authors is among the first to provide answers, based on a field study with a Kenyan digital news platform.

The writers were split into three groups – one-third continued on the existing per-article contract; one-third moved to a pay-per-click (PPC) model; and one-third chose between the two options.

PAY

• Although their articles received double the views of the control group – good news for advertisers! - the journalists who moved to pay-per-click saw their overall earnings fall by 49 per cent

CONTENT

• The pay-per-click journalists focused more on national stories, and on political topics. These shifts are consistent with writers maximizing reach by selecting topics with broad appeal. However, the resulting decline in comprehensive and locally-relevant coverage may carry important civic costs.

TONE

• The pay-per-click writers used fewer positive words in their headlines and produced articles with higher toxicity scores and more negative tone.

Dr Stalinski said “While PPC writers earned more per article, their overall earnings fell, lowering the firm’s wage bill and increasing platform profits. However, these profits come at a cost: PPC writers shifted content production away from local news and towards attention-grabbing political stories.

“PPC writers also used less positive language in both headlines and article bodies. Our results show that engagement-based pay boosts reader traffic, but we also caution that this may come at the cost of compromised coverage diversity, local news provision, and journalist well-being.”

• Incentivizing Engagement: Experimental Evidence on Journalist Performance PayLink opens in a new window Ivan Balbuzanov, Jared Gars, Mateusz Stalinski & Emilia Tjernström Warwick Economics Research Papers No: 1570 July 2025