Short communication The impact of geotargeting on household information acquisition: Evidence from a Google News redesign

Abstract

This paper examines how geotargeting influences the geographic patterns of households' information acquisition. We find that the 2010 redesign of the US edition of Google News, which added a strip of geotargeted local news content, had a significant impact on households' acquisition of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings of local companies relative to nonlocal companies. The impact is more pronounced in Zip Codes where households make more equity investments, and when companies have more newsworthy events. We also show that the impact is attenuated over time. Similar effects are documented using an alternative web traffic dataset from ComScore. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for user data privacy regulations that govern geotargeting practices.