Influence of Search Neutrality on the Economics of Advertisement-Financed Content

摘要

The search neutrality debate questions the ranking methods of search engines. We analyze the issue when content providers offer content for free, but get revenues-from advertising. We investigate the noncooperative game among competing content providers under different ranking policies. When the search engine is not involved with high-quality content providers, it should adopt neutral ranking, also maximizing user quality-of-experience. If the search engine controls high-quality content, favoring its ranking and adding advertisement yield a larger revenue. Though user perceived quality may not be impaired, the advertising revenues of the other content providers drastically decrease.